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SCOTUS gay rights case

Does this woman’s religion *require* her to run a business? If she wants to make websites for her friends she can do that all she wants and refuse whoever she wants. If she wants to run a business of public accommodation under the aegis of the State then that’s a bit different. She would only be *forced* to violate her religious beliefs if her religion requires her business. If she doesn’t want to sell products that may conflict with her values she always has the option to not sell those products on the open market and remain comfortable in her religious beliefs.
 
I agree but I’m also wondering why I can be firced to create something that I find repugnant or co treat to my deeply held religious or political beliefs? Or that violates my aesthetic sense?

For the most part I agree with what you're saying, but

But I should not be forced to create a cake in flavors I don’t like to use ( say, licorice cakes or root beer frosting) or that espouse ideas I find distasteful ir immoral. I should not be required to write on a cake the words Fuck Ted Cruz or Johnny is a Big Fat Sissy or Next Time Traitors Burn The Place Down!

But I disagree on the last part. Writing on a cake is not a creative thing, I don't believe you should be allowed to censor what someone wants written on a cake.

I could and should be required to write Congratulations Chuck and Jake if I would write Congratulations Christine and Jake.

And note that this is directly contradictory to your other requirement.

There are limits to what one can or should be able to ask someone to create for them.

The key word is create. Not sell. Create.


After all, we do not require novelists to write books for any and all types of person or an artist to paint any type of painting.

Exactly--which is my point about things that require creativity.

Photographers and bakers and other creators are just that: creators. Not merchants.

But note that not everything they do requires creativity even though they are creative professions. I believe the protection should be strong but only when they are actually engaged in creativity.
Not everything a novelist does involves creativity. The novelist must act, to a certain extent, as a business person, even if they have an agent who takes care of most of that side of the business for them.
 
I agree but I’m also wondering why I can be firced to create something that I find repugnant or co treat to my deeply held religious or political beliefs? Or that violates my aesthetic sense?

For the most part I agree with what you're saying, but

But I should not be forced to create a cake in flavors I don’t like to use ( say, licorice cakes or root beer frosting) or that espouse ideas I find distasteful ir immoral. I should not be required to write on a cake the words Fuck Ted Cruz or Johnny is a Big Fat Sissy or Next Time Traitors Burn The Place Down!

But I disagree on the last part. Writing on a cake is not a creative thing, I don't believe you should be allowed to censor what someone wants written on a cake.

I could and should be required to write Congratulations Chuck and Jake if I would write Congratulations Christine and Jake.

And note that this is directly contradictory to your other requirement.

There are limits to what one can or should be able to ask someone to create for them.

The key word is create. Not sell. Create.


After all, we do not require novelists to write books for any and all types of person or an artist to paint any type of painting.

Exactly--which is my point about things that require creativity.

Photographers and bakers and other creators are just that: creators. Not merchants.

But note that not everything they do requires creativity even though they are creative professions. I believe the protection should be strong but only when they are actually engaged in creativity.

It does require creativity and skill to write on a cake and to do it well.

I DO think that no one should be able to compel you to write any words you find offensive or repugnant. That said if one is willing to write Happy Anniversary Fred and Wilma then they should also be willing to write Happy Anniversary Fred and Barney. If one wishes to avoid being placed in such a situation, one can limit one's writing on such cakes to Happy Anniversary.
 
I agree but I’m also wondering why I can be firced to create something that I find repugnant or co treat to my deeply held religious or political beliefs? Or that violates my aesthetic sense?

For the most part I agree with what you're saying, but

But I should not be forced to create a cake in flavors I don’t like to use ( say, licorice cakes or root beer frosting) or that espouse ideas I find distasteful ir immoral. I should not be required to write on a cake the words Fuck Ted Cruz or Johnny is a Big Fat Sissy or Next Time Traitors Burn The Place Down!

But I disagree on the last part. Writing on a cake is not a creative thing, I don't believe you should be allowed to censor what someone wants written on a cake.

I could and should be required to write Congratulations Chuck and Jake if I would write Congratulations Christine and Jake.

And note that this is directly contradictory to your other requirement.

There are limits to what one can or should be able to ask someone to create for them.

The key word is create. Not sell. Create.


After all, we do not require novelists to write books for any and all types of person or an artist to paint any type of painting.

Exactly--which is my point about things that require creativity.

Photographers and bakers and other creators are just that: creators. Not merchants.

But note that not everything they do requires creativity even though they are creative professions. I believe the protection should be strong but only when they are actually engaged in creativity.

It does require creativity and skill to write on a cake and to do it well.

I DO think that no one should be able to compel you to write any words you find offensive or repugnant. That said if one is willing to write Happy Anniversary Fred and Wilma then they should also be willing to write Happy Anniversary Fred and Barney. If one wishes to avoid being placed in such a situation, one can limit one's writing on such cakes to Happy Anniversary.
This is self-contradictory. You claim nobody should be able to compel you to write words that you find offensive or repugnant, and then you immediately follow up with a situation where you do wish to compel somebody.
 
I wish to make a point: the plaintiff is not objecting to any particular message she was asked to write. She is suing her state for passing a law that forbids discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In other words, the right she is suing for is very specifically the right to discriminate, not the right to exercise freedom over the content of her artwork.
That's not "in other words"; that's saying something different. Your characterization of the issue in dispute does not match Wikipedia's. "Smith claims it would have been against her Christian faith to make sites for non-heterosexual marriages." So what evidence do you have that she's suing for anything more than the right to exercise freedom over the content of her artwork?

Her clients are only theoretical;
Very sensible of her to seek an injunction in advance, rather than risk running afoul of a law that ends up being upheld. This is what test cases are for. What, should people only be allowed to know what the law is after they've already broken it? Should the government be allowed to get away with overstepping its bounds because of the chilling effect uncertainty has on getting anyone to challenge the law?

In the early Roman Republic the patricians got away with oppressing the plebeians because the law was oral tradition, and the patricians knew it better than the plebeians. The plebeians had to go on strike to force the patricians to agree to have written laws. From then on Roman laws were required to be written to be enforceable. Hundreds of years later, Caligula found that a little too confining for his taste in despotism and decreed that his laws were to be written at the top of some unscalable pillar. If you object to a court ruling on the rights of theoretical clients, you are playing Caligula.

she wants the right to forbid any business to gays altogether.
Show your work. What indication do you see that she's asking the court to authorize her to turn away, for example, a gay mother wanting to buy a website for her son's het marriage?

So all these hypotheticals should be likewise addressing discrimination against whole classes of people. Can a public business refuse to serve Germans on the sole basis of their apparent race?
I.e., you don't want the court to rule on the narrow question before it, so you're claiming it's the same as a broader question. But that you choose not to distinguish two questions doesn't constrain the rest of us to make believe that they're identical.

The only.question, and it is a worrying question, is whether they will keep the ruling customarily minimal in scope, or as is worryingly likely, take the opportunity to write an opinion so broad in scope as to open the door for the case that will take down Obergefell v Hodges on similar grounds of free speech obviating the right of states to define their own policies on discrimination.
"While the petition asked whether Employment Division v. Smith should be overruled, the Supreme Court limited the case to the question of whether Colorado's law violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment." The court wouldn't have done that if they had any intention of taking Obergefell down with it. Obergefell wasn't a First Amendment case.

I will never understand why any atheist conservative would want to live under a Christian theocracy. Are you guys genuinely too stupid to realize they'll be coming for you next, once the sexual deviants are all in jail? Fascist states cannot have a true end point or concrete goal, their political power is contingent on constantly identifying new targets for persecution, and they will do so until they finally go too far and are overthrown.
Oh for pete's sake, do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound? Theocrats are not in the business of putting up obstacles to government power over the people. Theocrats are in the business of forcing the people to express support for government policy.

Why are you even bothering to make arguments like that? Do you think you can talk us into forgetting who you are? We are not stupid enough not to realize that if the progressives win this one you'll be coming for us next. It isn't the Christians who are punishing hate speech while defining more and more ideas as hateful. Progressives in countries without robust free speech protections have already criminalized racism; you are already arguing for weakening free speech protection in the U.S.; and you personally have already trumped up false accusations of racism against me. So why in god's name would it be rational for an infidel like me to be more worried about Christian theocracy than progressive theocracy? Even if the Christians were trying as hard to erode the right to dissent as the progressives -- and they aren't -- Christianity is a dying faith, hemorrhaging believers faster than it can replace them. Progressivism is aggressive, on the march, growing by leaps and bounds, and full of no-fanatic-like-a-converted-fanatics.

When the progressive fascists persecute the homophobes into silence you'll be identifying new targets for persecution, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the writing on the wall, and know that sooner or later you're coming for the capitalists. So if I somehow manage to get through your revolution and subsequent police state without being shot, at least nobody will ever have to listen to me reciting "First they came for the homophobes and I said nothing because I was not a homophobe."
 


Her clients are only theoretical;
Very sensible of her to seek an injunction in advance, rather than risk running afoul of a law that ends up being upheld. This is what test cases are for. What, should people only be allowed to know what the law is after they've already broken it? Should the government be allowed to get away with overstepping its bounds because of the chilling effect uncertainty has on getting anyone to challenge the law?
I admit to not being an expert on the law but it seems that most of the time the courts make sure that someone has *standing* to sue and that usually seems to require an actual material harm from a law. So I would think that this person would have to wait until the law resulted in harm to her business.

I don’t know what “test case” means here but maybe that is something special that courts do that doesn’t require standing.
 
I agree but I’m also wondering why I can be firced to create something that I find repugnant or co treat to my deeply held religious or political beliefs?
So, you don't have to under the description of free speech that I use.

You can be forced to provide something for a USE you find repugnant, but the thing itself you have control over the boundaries of. If someone repugnant manages to stay within those boundaries? Then they must be served.

That's not "in other words"; that's saying something different. Your characterization of the issue in dispute does not match Wikipedia's. "Smith claims it would have been against her Christian faith to make sites for non-heterosexual marriages." So what evidence do you have that she's suing for anything more than the right to exercise freedom over the content of her artwork?
If the client can request a website "for the promotion of healthy relationships", while using placeholders for any content that would force her to actually produce homosexual content, then they lose their grounds for request.

It strikes me as an available legal avenue of questing such that "if the client requested this instead, would you have refused service, even if the request came from "gaymarriageplanning.com"?

At that point it isn't about content, it is as stated about creating a framework that can be taken the last mile.

As you recall, the wedding cake debacle happened because the clients requested the cake without the topper that would make it explicitly gay, and that's why the case was decided as it was.

Very sensible of her to seek an injunction in advance, rather than risk running afoul of a law that ends up being upheld.
Except that the law does not require her to make a gay website. It at best maintains that she must make a website that may be used for gay purposes.

She lacks standing entirely, as the law already fails to compel her to make gay content, even while it compels her to make content for customers who are gay and will use it that way. Again, it's the cake topper all over again.
 
It appears the proper course of action is for a person to serve everyone but not be forced to "violate" their religious freedom in so doing. That's not terribly difficult to understand or implement. So in this case there really isn't a problem.
 
Reli
It appears the proper course of action is for a person to serve everyone but not be forced to "violate" their religious freedom in so doing. That's not terribly difficult to understand or implement. So in this case there really isn't a problem.
Reilgious freedom means free exercise of her religion. In what way is she not able to exercise her religion? Is running a business of public accommodation a tenet of her religion?
 
Reli
It appears the proper course of action is for a person to serve everyone but not be forced to "violate" their religious freedom in so doing. That's not terribly difficult to understand or implement. So in this case there really isn't a problem.
Reilgious freedom means free exercise of her religion. In what way is she not able to exercise her religion? Is running a business of public accommodation a tenet of her religion?
Well, it’s religious freedom and freedom of speech. If a newspaper, web forum, or any other person or corporation cannot be compelled to carry a message they disagree with, why should this lady be held to a different standard?
 
Reli
It appears the proper course of action is for a person to serve everyone but not be forced to "violate" their religious freedom in so doing. That's not terribly difficult to understand or implement. So in this case there really isn't a problem.
Reilgious freedom means free exercise of her religion. In what way is she not able to exercise her religion? Is running a business of public accommodation a tenet of her religion?
Well, it’s religious freedom and freedom of speech. If a newspaper, web forum, or any other person or corporation cannot be compelled to carry a message they disagree with, why should this lady be held to a different standard?
Neither religious freedom nor freedom of speech are absolutes. Web forums are not businesses. Historically, newspapers have had special privileges that other businesses have not enjoyed (exemption from sales taxes, etc...).
 
Reli
It appears the proper course of action is for a person to serve everyone but not be forced to "violate" their religious freedom in so doing. That's not terribly difficult to understand or implement. So in this case there really isn't a problem.
Reilgious freedom means free exercise of her religion. In what way is she not able to exercise her religion? Is running a business of public accommodation a tenet of her religion?
Well, it’s religious freedom and freedom of speech. If a newspaper, web forum, or any other person or corporation cannot be compelled to carry a message they disagree with, why should this lady be held to a different standard?
So, if I make billboards and a Christian organization comes to my business and wants one with “Jesus is Lord” on it I can refuse them, yes?
 
Reli
It appears the proper course of action is for a person to serve everyone but not be forced to "violate" their religious freedom in so doing. That's not terribly difficult to understand or implement. So in this case there really isn't a problem.
Reilgious freedom means free exercise of her religion. In what way is she not able to exercise her religion? Is running a business of public accommodation a tenet of her religion?
Well, it’s religious freedom and freedom of speech. If a newspaper, web forum, or any other person or corporation cannot be compelled to carry a message they disagree with, why should this lady be held to a different standard?
So, if I make billboards and a Christian organization comes to my business and wants one with “Jesus is Lord” on it I can refuse them, yes?
No. No one is being required to be religious. Where is the infringement on religious freedom?
 
Reli
It appears the proper course of action is for a person to serve everyone but not be forced to "violate" their religious freedom in so doing. That's not terribly difficult to understand or implement. So in this case there really isn't a problem.
Reilgious freedom means free exercise of her religion. In what way is she not able to exercise her religion? Is running a business of public accommodation a tenet of her religion?
Well, it’s religious freedom and freedom of speech. If a newspaper, web forum, or any other person or corporation cannot be compelled to carry a message they disagree with, why should this lady be held to a different standard?
So, if I make billboards and a Christian organization comes to my business and wants one with “Jesus is Lord” on it I can refuse them, yes?
No. No one is being required to be religious. Where is the infringement on religious freedom?
It’s a “message I disagree with”. Can I be compelled to design a billboard that says that?
 
Reli
It appears the proper course of action is for a person to serve everyone but not be forced to "violate" their religious freedom in so doing. That's not terribly difficult to understand or implement. So in this case there really isn't a problem.
Reilgious freedom means free exercise of her religion. In what way is she not able to exercise her religion? Is running a business of public accommodation a tenet of her religion?
Well, it’s religious freedom and freedom of speech. If a newspaper, web forum, or any other person or corporation cannot be compelled to carry a message they disagree with, why should this lady be held to a different standard?
So, if I make billboards and a Christian organization comes to my business and wants one with “Jesus is Lord” on it I can refuse them, yes?
No. No one is being required to be religious. Where is the infringement on religious freedom?
It’s a “message I disagree with”. Can I be compelled to design a billboard that says that?
You're not condoning anything. You still disagree with the message. Okay. Where is the "harm?" How has your religion been infringed upon by making the billboard?
 
I guess I am not understanding the standard here. Is it a free exercise issue and it interferes with her ability exercise her religion? Or is it a free speech issue and it’s merely something she disagrees with, based on “sincerely held religious beliefs”? It must be the latter I would think and so my comparison is apt.
 
I guess I am not understanding the standard here. Is it a free exercise issue and it interferes with her ability exercise her religion? Or is it a free speech issue and it’s merely something she disagrees with, based on “sincerely held religious beliefs”? It must be the latter I would think and so my comparison is apt.
I think the best answer is that the issue is in her head and how she approaches it. The issue isn't her religion, it's her emotional/intellectual state.
 
I guess I am not understanding the standard here. Is it a free exercise issue and it interferes with her ability exercise her religion? Or is it a free speech issue and it’s merely something she disagrees with, based on “sincerely held religious beliefs”? It must be the latter I would think and so my comparison is apt.
The argument being made in the case is that this is an infringement on this business owner's free speech, on the legal theory that her artwork could become "compelled speech" and thus de facto forbidden according to stare decisis concerning First Amendment cases on the Court. The grounds for her objection are partly religious, but they can't argue that directly, as it would be impossible to demonstrate that she had any standing to press the suit. So her lawyers agreed to solely present the compelled speech argument, mostly at the behest of the Court itself which refused to otherwise hear the case, back at the start of the year.
 
I guess I am not understanding the standard here. Is it a free exercise issue and it interferes with her ability exercise her religion? Or is it a free speech issue and it’s merely something she disagrees with, based on “sincerely held religious beliefs”? It must be the latter I would think and so my comparison is apt.
The argument being made in the case is that this is an infringement on this business owner's free speech, on the legal theory that her artwork could become "compelled speech" and thus de facto forbidden via the stare decisis concerning First Amendment cases on the Court. The grounds for her objection are partly religious, but they know they can't argue that directly, as it would be impossible to demonstrate that she had any standing to press the suit. So her lawyers agreed to solely present the compelled speech argument, mostly at the behest of the Court itself which refused to otherwise hear the case.
So does that mean according to her logic my billboard business could refuse the Christian organization that wanted me to design a billboard that says “Jesus is Lord”? I assume she’d be ok with that.
 
I guess I am not understanding the standard here. Is it a free exercise issue and it interferes with her ability exercise her religion? Or is it a free speech issue and it’s merely something she disagrees with, based on “sincerely held religious beliefs”? It must be the latter I would think and so my comparison is apt.
The argument being made in the case is that this is an infringement on this business owner's free speech, on the legal theory that her artwork could become "compelled speech" and thus de facto forbidden via the stare decisis concerning First Amendment cases on the Court. The grounds for her objection are partly religious, but they know they can't argue that directly, as it would be impossible to demonstrate that she had any standing to press the suit. So her lawyers agreed to solely present the compelled speech argument, mostly at the behest of the Court itself which refused to otherwise hear the case.
So does that mean according to her logic my billboard business could refuse the Christian organization that wanted me to design a billboard that says “Jesus is Lord”? I assume she’d be ok with that.
Presumably, yes. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's already legal for you to do, even in Colorado; I don't see how this legislation would affect that as its focus is pretty narrow around LGBT issues. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of any obvious reason why that would be illegal.

That said, it would be illegal, in any state, to put up a sign saying "No Christians need apply", or "This water fountain is for Buddhists only", which would be a better analogy for what this business owner wants to be allowed to do. She is suing for the right to discriminate against gays as a whole class, not for the right to refuse to include any specific message or image.
 
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