As has been noted, the word "compel" would be used if the person were legally bound to accept the authority/responsibility, and that would be tantamount to involuntary servitude in this situation.
Just out of curiosity, if a state were to legally bind a baker to bake a cake for a gay wedding, would you also regard that as tantamount to involuntary servitude?
If the baker was not otherwise working as a public baker of wedding cakes, then yes, it would be. For example, the state could not go into a random restaurant, pull out a random cake baker, and compel them to bake a cake for a gay wedding, which would be analogous to the situation being described in this thread.
I see, so whether legally binding someone to do what he doesn't want to do qualifies as "compelling him" and "involuntary servitude" doesn't depend on whether what he is being bound to do is compulsory and on whether the service he is to provide is involuntary. Do I have that right? What it depends on is whether
people who think like you put the service being coerced from him
in your same mental category with some other service the fellow provides willingly. Are you seriously under the impression that that's an intellectually defensible criterion for "compel" and "involuntary servitude"?
No, you don't have it right. Forget about baking cakes, it was stupid to bring that issue into this thread so that you could torture it into an analogy.
No, I evidently do have it right; and what was stupid was making the "that would be tantamount to involuntary servitude" argument even though you support compelling bakers to work events they don't volunteer to participate in. If Trausti wants to invoke the "involuntary servitude" clause, fine -- I haven't seen him post in favor of the government ordering people to bake cakes. But when
you invoke it it's hypocrisy.
The Governor in this case is not holding himself out publicly as a Public Defender, therefore, there is no legal binding that he should defend any member of the public, much less this particular member of the public.
In the first place, that in no way follows, as a matter of established law. A lawyer doesn't need to "hold himself out" as anything in order to be legally bound in that way. Lawyers have been getting ordered to defend poor people pro bono at least since the 15th century. Anybody who's read "To Kill a Mockingbird" should be familiar with this concept -- Atticus Finch was ordered to defend the accused rapist.
In the second place, how someone "holds himself out" has no rational bearing on whether service is voluntary. When you decide what's voluntary based on how someone "holds himself out", you are not deciding based on whether he's volunteering. When a prostitute holds herself out as a purveyor of sex for money, and then she refuses to put out for some client who she decides at the last second is unacceptable, so he forces her,
he's a rapist! And when he then throws money at her as he walks away, and thereby completes the arranged deal she agreed to,
he's still a rapist! See how it works?
In the third place, the baker is not, in point of fact, holding himself out publicly as a maker of a cake for the gay wedding of some client you define him as obligated to. You simply arbitrarily lump different actions into categories, according to some classification scheme chosen by you to please your own sensibilities; and you define "baking cakes for the public" to be one of your categories; and you define anyone who engages in certain subsets of the actions in that category to be "holding himself out publicly as a baker", regardless of whether he posted a unilateral contract saying "If you give me money I'll bake you a cake" or a sign saying "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." Your categorization of baking cakes for gay weddings as being an essential element of being a public baker has no more objective reality to it than King Henry VII's categorization of defending poor people as being an essential element of being a lawyer, and a hell of a lot less institutional history.
And in the fourth place, even if a baker made it abundantly clear that he wasn't holding himself out publicly as a maker of cakes for gay weddings, because the only reference to wedding cakes on his public face is his shop window, listing among his services, "Cakes for Christian Weddings", you wouldn't regard that as sufficient grounds for allowing him to refuse to bake for weddings he considers unchristian, would you?
Even if he were a Public Defender, there are reasons he could legally use to not take the case. Those reasons do not include "the defendant is gay".
I.e., you decide what's "involuntary servitude" based on
the reason for not volunteering. That is irrational. You might as well claim when a man in a neolithic subsistence farming community is kidnapped in a slave raid by the neighboring tribe, and put to work farming their fields, that's not involuntary servitude, because he was already holding himself out publicly as an unpaid farmer, so it's ethnic discrimination for him to refuse to work the kidnappers' fields, and legitimate reasons do not include ethnic discrimination.
They very likely do include "I am the sitting Governor of the State of Missouri, and the duties of that office preclude me from acting as a Public Defender".
Not seeing how the duties of a governor preclude someone from acting as an appointed counsel. They don't seem to preclude a governor from acting as a golfer.
