The Morals & Principles of Cake: Derail from SCOTUS to take the cake

[Juma]

no. i say you are a nazi.

For believing that someone keeps their constitutional rights even when they start a business? Please point to me in the Constitution where you lose your rights for having a business? Where are public accomodations defined in the Constitution?

No. For ignoring the rights of others. For being a gigantic egoist.

 

[Bomb#20]

no. i say you are a nazi.

For believing that someone keeps their constitutional rights even when they start a business? Please point to me in the Constitution where you lose your rights for having a business? Where are public accomodations defined in the Constitution?

No. For ignoring the rights of others. For being a gigantic egoist.

I.e., "Nazi" here means "person who judges what's legal by reading the law instead of by catering to the demands of the currently fashionable mass political movement." It's a metaphor derived from the Nazis having been such well-known sticklers for legality.[/sarcasm]

But left-wingers' strawman rhetorical tactics aside, Juma's reply points to a deeper problem. If you don't lose your rights for having a business, but for not respecting the definition of "rights" the mass political movement makes up, and for being a gigantic nonbeliever in their ideology, then the loss of rights isn't limited to people running businesses, so there is nothing to stop the movement from targeting ordinary workers. Today, it's "Do what we define as your job for the person we designate, or we won't let you run a business.", but tomorrow it can be "Do what we define as your job for the person we designate, full stop."

In another thread, Tom Sawyer already advocated letting the government punish a person for quitting his job, if they found that his reason for quitting was discriminatory. Juma appears to be entering the same totalitarian territory here -- if the government can punish a guy in the baking business for not selling his baking services to gays, but it isn't having a business that makes him lose his rights, then it follows that the government can also punish a common bakery employee for not selling his baking services to the gay man who just bought the bakery. By quitting his job, the worker is being a gigantic egoist and ignoring the buyer's right not to be discriminated against for homosexuality.

 

[Bomb#20]

no. i say you are a nazi.

For believing that someone keeps their constitutional rights even when they start a business? Please point to me in the Constitution where you lose your rights for having a business? Where are public accomodations defined in the Constitution?

No, for thinking that the rights of some people matter and the rights of certain other people don't matter at all.

Non-fascists believe that your rights end the moment they impose on someone else's rights. You have zero concerns about someone else's rights being trampled as long as that someone else is from a minority group that you hate.

I understand reasoning with Underseer is pointless, because he's a resentment-filled religious fanatic and he doesn't give a damn whether the things he writes about people in the minority groups he hates are true or not. What he said about coloradoatheist isn't true. Underseer didn't have any reason to think it's true. But he said it anyway, because being truthful doesn't matter to him, because he's a bad person. What matters to him is that coloradoatheist is a libertarian, which makes him fair game for anti-libertarian bigotry.

But for the benefit of anyone who's unclear about coloroadoatheist's actual position, he too thinks everyone's rights matter and they end when they impose on someone else's. The underlying disagreement is not about those points, but about specifically which rights actually exist. Underseer believes in "positive" rights -- i.e., the right of some people to make other people do things for them. Coloradoatheist believes in "negative" rights -- i.e., the right of all people to be left alone and not be made to do things for others. This inevitably causes a difference of opinion about who is imposing on whose rights.

This has of course been explained to Underseer any number of times, but he prefers to tell himself that coloradoatheist and libertarians in general don't actually care about the "positive"/"negative" distinction, and are actually motivated by hatred of the people who's "positive" rights they don't recognize. Underseer is pretending coloradoatheist sides with the baker because he hates gays, even though it's painfully obvious that coloradoatheist (and libertarians in general) would also side with a gay baker who refused to make a cake for a libertarian wedding. Underseer prefers to tell himself libertarians are all about gay-hatred because he likes the feeling of superiority he gets from looking down on his enemies, and making up fake motivations for them is a much easier way to see them as cartoon villains than thinking about their arguments is.

we already had this debate during the civil rights era. I thought this matter was settled.

It should be painfully obvious to anyone of more than feeble intelligence that settling a matter politically does not mean it is settled ideologically. Being on the losing side of a political dispute doesn't make people's moral intuitions go away. The fall of the Soviet Union didn't persuade communists that they're wrong.

 

[fromderinside]

Let me try a least harm test. If the moral obligation falls on the general class or subclass within a society covered by equality rights then the one claiming rights at the expense of that class is wrong to do so for whatever reason. On the other hand laws should be evaluated against a nations social principles.

If that nation is a democracy with the value all persons are of equal status and it separates church and state as does the US, then the one claiming rights against the presumed secular values of the many on the basis of strongly held individual or faith based moral belief must, the arenas of politics, general activities, and career, give way to secular equality norms.

This attitude always places the burden of one's beliefs on the individual with the beliefs rather than carving out individual rights over general rights and free activity for any subclass. In whatever secular arena an individual right must give way secular equality rights. It is upon the individual to make choices such that his personal beliefs don't threaten the rights of others.

The most obvious workaround in business is to publish values held by individuals who hold beliefs that are counter to equal secular values in their business or to limit their business choices to only those activities open to the general population. The fact that you have a business does not give you the right to withhold ordinary services from those that conflict with your specific beliefs.

Example: Bake cakes for weddings? Can't stomach sexual freedom? Limit your baking activity to only those portions to which you have no moral objection for anybody. Contract with vendors who do such work without restriction for all wedding cake activity that smacks of personalization activity.