While I was at the gym this morning, I was listening to Thomas Smith’s podcast, Serious Inquiries Only, and in particular, the latest episode, SIO108: Sam Harris Sides with Ben Shapiro Over the FFRF. The title covers the problem. Sam Harris, once again, has a nice civil conversation with a flaming conservative asshole, Ben Shapiro, and they end up agreeing that bakeries ought to be able to discriminate against gay people, since the Market will just fix everything up.
Right. Business as usual for the Harris wing of atheism.
Smith does a phenomenal job of flaying all of the participants, but I want to pick on one thing. Another participant was Eric Weinstein, who got a lot of attention for his assertion that there was an “Intellectual Dark Web” where all the smart guys, like Jordan Peterson (??!? Fuck me!) were hanging out, and that they expected to be persecuted any moment now by the Powers That Be.
Wait, “Intellectual Dark Web”? What the heck is that? In the conversation, it is revealed that there are about 25 people that Weinstein turns to to discuss matters of import.
Hang on there, guy. That’s not a “web”, it’s a bubble. We’ve had those for decades. I’m on a couple of mailing lists that are much bigger than that, and talk about substantial stuff like teaching biology. We don’t call ourselves the Bio-Intellectual Web. It’s a goddamn trivial mailing list.
It could also be something like a Google Group. We’ve got one of those with about 30 people on it for Freethoughtblogs. We’ve been missing an opportunity — we should rename it to the Brilliant Freethought Web! And don’t you wish you were good enough to be on it.
I suspect he called it the “Dark” web because it sounds edgy. Probably the only reason it deserves that adjective, though, is because it includes people like Peterson, who are pretty dim to begin with.
…wait, isn’t the “dark web” where pedophiles hang out?
It’s DARK web. Acronym. Debauched and Repellent Knowledge.
“Intellectual Dark Web”, obviously run by the Illuminati!
richardelguru:
Well, obviously. The Intellectual Dark Web are the greatest scientific minds of the nation and they advise those who actually run the government (the deep government, the dark government) so that everything is run perfectly and the US don’t never screw up.
They’re doing a great job, neh?
I s’pose, but on the whole I’d prefer Caligula.
If he wants to be edgy he should call it the Deep Web, otherwise he sounds like he’s playing Dungeons and Dragons.
These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.
Interesting, and not in a good way. The Common Law as it came to us from England and we incorporated most of it into our laws is that if you set yourself up as a business that serves the public you serve ALL the public, you do not get to pick and choose. Ask Blackstone.
Eric Weinstein; same bloke who supposedly came up with a Theory of Everything a few years ago?
The Hole in the Net Gang.
More as an aside, my question for these people who think the free market will fix things up is almost always “If the free market will fix it, how did the free market allow it to become a problem in the first place?” Do they ever address such a question? I realize that, when they sit in the comfort of their bubbles, they probably don’t even get asked the question. I figure if the answer is that we don’t have a truly free market, then they’ve just killed off their proposed solution of “do nothing.” Or maybe their solution then would be “Deregulate!” *sigh*
In a dark, dark town there was a dark, dark street
and in the dark, dark street there was a dark, dark house,
and in the dark, dark house there was a dark, dark computer
and on the dark, dark computer there was a dark, dark web
and on the dark dark web….
twenty-five nutcases lived!
Leo Buzalsky:
Yes, they do have an answer for that. They claim that the only reason anything is screwed up is because of government interference.
Caine @ 10: thank you for starting my day with a laugh.
Bodach, welcome. :D
Well, then, let’s by all means call it the Intellectual Dim Web.
Peterson’s ‘dark web’ clique are probably some sort of preppers building bunkers to guard against the inevitable destruction of the world by Lyotard reading art students. Now that their Marxist hunting AI didn’t get off the ground (or did it?)
I’m gay, and married to my same sex partner for 20 years, and would have been pissed if a baker had refused to make us a wedding cake. That said, I think it’s a closer case than either side will acknowledge.
The baker’s supporters ignore that total religious liberty is neither possible nor desirable. There are people whose religious beliefs would have them hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. There are people whose religious beliefs would have them marry and have sex with eight year olds. There are people whose religious beliefs result in their children dying of easily preventable illness, or refusing to pay taxes. So the idea that someone’s religion gives them a free pass from obeying the law is just nonsense. Next time I get stopped for speeding, I’ll just tell the nice officer that my religion requires me to drive 20 miles above the speed limit and see where that gets me.
On the other hand, in a free society, if the government is going to require people to ignore their most deeply held ethical beliefs (and disagree as I do with the baker, he is acting out of a deeply held ethical belief), then I think the stakes should be a lot higher than they are here. There is inherent value in allowing people to actively practice what they believe, and I think society should only intrude on that on stuff that has a major impact. In this case, there were probably 10 other bakeries within a give mile radius that would have been happy to sell a gay couple a cake. So I’m just not convinced that the harm caused by requiring the gay couple to get a cake somewhere else is outweighed by the harm in intruding on the baker’s conscience. And a cake isn’t even a necessity like a job or a place to live.
Ultimately, if I were on the Supreme Court, I would probably rule against the baker. But I’m not convinced it’s a slam dunk.
A secret clubhouse for Smart Men to hide their Important Work that would surely be censored if the public knew how paradigm-shattering it was? That’s freakin’ adorable.
They were also going to spell it “IntelleKtual Dark Wyb” with this rocking guitar solo theme that automatically played whenever someone said the name, but then they had no place where they could swap out an “s” for a “z” which just threw the whole aesthetic off. After that they figured just having “Dark” in the name was good enough and watched episodes of Goof Troop for the rest of the afternoon.
“Another participant was Eric Weinstein, who got a lot of attention for his assertion that there was an “Intellectual Dark Web””
A web so stupendously dim that it is completely dark (no enlightenment allowed)? What a shock! Surely many have noticed that creationists and other idealogues redefine words that they do not understand. To them, Intellectual and stupid must mean the same thing since they have no idea what that first word means.
Stupid prejudices based on an ethically irrelevant distinction are not “deeply held ethical beliefs.” Should the baker be free to refuse to serve an interracial couple too?
Moot point who the baker serves. He should have been stoned to death already for mixing fabrics. Or showing disrespect to his parents. The fact that he hasn’t renders his whole belief system void.
I mean, there is a real dark web. Organised crime and such.
As for the free market: don’t you see the opportunities of that?
Straight only bakeries, straight only restaurants, straight only water fountains, straight only schools! Why do you hate straight people so much?
Sigh. Sam Harris is an ass. Throughout the ’40’s, ’50’s, and ’60’s, civil rights cases demonstrated clearly that in regards to prejudice — racial, religious, or other — the “free market” provides none, zero, bupkiss protection. Racial prejudice was so strong that a black person stuck on the wrong side of town might have to walk miles, past more than a dozen restaurants, before they could find one that would serve them. Establishments that wished to provide all-race service were “discouraged” by little things like: death threats; firebombings; and expensive legal sanctions from government authorities.
The principle has been well-established in law, practice, and experience that “serving the public” MUST mean ALL of the public.
That we are having to fight this war over again, fifty years after it had a stake put through its heart, is maddening!
Loonytarian Intellectual is an oxymoron.
Sam Harris is simply a boring, common malevolent idiot.
If the Noosphere is analogous to a garden, he would be a slug.
It’s what someone not very bright thinks sounds cool and edgy.
Or more likely,
It refers to their minds and thoughts which are rather dark and murky.
Azkyroth, what you consider a stupid prejudice is somebody else’s deeply held ethical belief. What matters is that it’s deeply held and not whether you agrees with it. Probably everyone has a deeply held belief that someone else thinks is stupid.
As far as the interracial couple goes, my analysis would be the same: How high are the stakes? Back in the 1950s and 1960s, blacks were basically shut out of most of the economy altogether, so civil rights laws were necessary to correct a system-wide problem. Today, when any bakery not run by a religious loon is perfectly happy to accept gay business, I’m not sure the rationale still holds.
And I’m also not convinced that racial prejudice and anti-gay prejudice are comparable. Suppose I am a photographer who hates children, so I refuse to photograph any event with children. That’s a prejudice, but is it more comparable to racism or homophobia or both or neither, and is it a prejudice the law should allow me to practice?
thirdmill:
That’s missing the point by a light year. This is about owning a business which caters to the public. If you have agreed with the common social contract, then you don’t get to discriminate against people. If someone just cannot cope with the idea of having to provide the service they advertise, they should not be in business with the public. Full fucking stop. I don’t give a shit what they believe. Xians keep going on and on about how making a fucking cake is “celebrating” gay marriage, as if the baker were taking part in the ceremony. They aren’t. They can cuss and curse all queers while making the cake, but they agreed to make said cakes when they opened shop, so that’s what they need to do.
thirdmill:
If you’re freelance, you’ll starve to death.
What you’re advocating is that everyone gets signs again! Irish need not apply. Blacks not welcome. Homosexuals not served. No, that counter is not for you. No, back of the bus. If you allow people to cater to their bigotry, we’ll be in a very bad situation in no time. Kind of like now, but worse.
While I ultimately favor anti discrimination law yeah curtailing a baker’s ability to refuse service to an interracial couple (or interfaith couple) is as much a burden on his liberty interest as the same sex couple case. In both cases I think the curtailing is reasonable if a but gross. And in any case there’s limits to what sort of entities are covered here. I would oppose any law that would require churches to marry interracial couples. (It’s currently the case that churches are free to be racists).
Liberals would do better to simply acknowledge anti discrimination law intrudes on non-essential liberty. That they are valuing fairness and/or equity over (negative) liberty.
For my part I favor anti discrimination law as a means to prevent private economic arm races. I would love to openingly discriminate against Christians but I’ll way that weapon down if they won’t discriminate against me.
Lunch counters under Jim Crow are irrelevant. A business was prevented by law from serving all people. “Whites only” was a government mandated policy. Not government permitted policy.
Also, I’m pretty sure Masterpiece Cakes opened before Obergefell, the relevant case, and/or Colorado anti-discrimination law passed. So the argument that Baker agreed to serve gay marriages when he opened up is moot. There weren’t any gay marriages when he opened and thus he *couldn’t* agree to serve them.
@thirdmill:
The transition from racial civil rights to gay civil rights seems odd here.
Does the fact that most places are not run by racists mean that it’s OK for one racist baker, with deeply held ethical convictions that miscegenation is wrong, to discriminate against providing a cake for an interracial couple for their wedding?
I don’t think that’s relevant, here. Per Wikipedia, the ceremony and civil marriage registration took place in Massachusetts. The same-sex couple [Craig and Mullins] wanted the cake for their celebration in Colorado. Is a celebration a marriage? I would say that usually it’s a secular event, not necessarily a religious or legal one. Is it legal to provide services to some celebrations, but not to others?
Given that the baker [Phillips] presumably thinks that Islam and Hinduism are false religions, would he be justified in denying his cake-baking to a Muslim or Hindu wedding celebration?
I’m assuming, by the way, that the cake in question has no text or iconography that endorses or conflicts with any religious sentiment. I note that in the case in question, the cake-baking was denied before even the question of design arose.
Yes requiring Phillips to serve a Muslim marriage burdens his liberty interest to the same degree. It’s warranted in both cases but let’s not pretend liberty is losing out to other values.
Masterpiece Cakes opened before 2003…the couple couldn’t celebrate (whatever) when he opened up. You can not tacitly agree to serve a non-existent thing.
Isn’t losing I meant
@Mike Smith:
Yet I am pretty sure that a case could be made for religious discrimination, in that hypothetical.
I’m pretty sure that anyone anywhere can celebrate whatever they want whenever they want (within reason, and all other factors being equal). A graduation; a birth; an anniversary; a business milestone; a lottery win; getting a pet; an eclipse; the successful passing of a kidney stone. Whatever.
Same-sex couples could and did have ceremonies and celebrations before their unions were legally recognized.
@thirdmill —
Do we want a legislative system based on the principle that discrimination on the basis of race/religion/sexuality is illegal if you provide a public service, or do we want a legislative system based on the principle that discrimination is only illegal if it’s bad enough? And who gets to decide what level of discrimination is illegal and what’s not bad enough? If we let a baker refuse to make a cake for a gay wedding, how many progressive bakeries per 10,000 people do we need to provide the service? At what point does it switch from baker-protects-personal-beliefs to baker-complicit-in-systemic-oppression? Do we allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense contraception? Maybe there’s another pharmacy in town that does, but what if it closes? Is the remaining pharmacist suddenly required to offer a service despite their moral objection?
You might feel that you can thoughtfully resolve all of these difficult problems and you might even be right…but do you feel a legislative framework can address all these issues in the real world better than a simple law against discrimination?
I think he meant intellectually dark.
chrislawson, No. 40, I want a legal system based on the premise that individual liberty is the default and the government has the burden of proving that any intrusions into personal liberty, regardless of context, are necessary to fix a problem big enough to justify a legislative solution. Reasonable minds won’t always agree on which problems are big enough, but what I don’t want is the idea that any problem, no matter how unimportant, justifies involving the state. And please keep in mind that in this case my ultimate bottom line is the same as everyone else’s here — I think the baker should probably lose — I just think it’s a closer case.
If I were a baker, there are some cakes that I flat out would not decorate. If a homophobic church is having an event, I would not bake them a cake, and they would probably sue for religious discrimination and probably win. Yet why should I, as a gay person, make a cake for an institution I find deeply offensive? It wouldn’t even matter if they wanted homophobic decorations; the mere fact that it’s a homophobic church would be enough for me to turn them away. And if my sensibilities should be protected, then why not the guy in Colorado? Unless you want to make the result-oriented argument that speech that you like is protected and speech that you don’t like isn’t, then I don’t see a principled way out of it. Either the guy in Colorado and I both have to do things we find deeply offensive, or neither of us does.
So, I shall play Solomon and divide the baby. As a member of the Supreme Court, the issue before me would be whether the anti-discrimination law is constitutional. Answer: Yes. Both the Colorado baker and the thirdmill baker lose their cases. However, as a policy maker, if I were a member of the Colorado legislature, I’m not sure I would vote for a law that required anyone to bake a cake for anyone else. The stakes are too small.
Caine, actually, the law in most places is that unless you are a member of a protected class — race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, disabled — a business owner is allowed to refuse to do business with you. If I don’t want to serve people of a certain zodiac sign, or who have the letter F in their name, or who have pets, or who eat cold cereal for breakfast, I may be too stupid to deserve to have a business, but in most places I won’t be breaking the law.
The stakes are not small for the person being refused service.
Discrimination is a wedge issue. Whenever discrimination has been allowed in one instance, there has been an immediate clamour for further instances of discrimination. And so we go down that road.
Anti-discrimination is just a big “No Exit” sign for society. Don’t Go Down This Road. Bridge Out. Danger.
Intellectual Dim Web more like.
For those who want to learn more about the Colorado cake case — or who can’t get enough Thomas Smith in their lives — Opening Arguments has done a couple deep dives that are worth a listen.
A preview from September: https://openargs.com/oa105-gay-wedding-cakes/
A breakdown of the oral arguments: https://openargs.com/oa131-andrew2-w-guest-andrew-seidel/
So Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are in a “Intellectual Dark Web”? Hah! That’s more like a “Blackhole of Stupid”.
dark web what a pretentious pile of bull shit
clearly not dark enough like totally off would be better
the question seems to be is arbitrary and irrational discrimination compatible with civil rights and human rights? Is it something that is desirable for a civil society to allow? Should the government by allowing such kinds of discrimination promote the divisiveness that such discrimination represents?
In my opinion the answer would be N O, it would be a mistake to go down that road.
That queer people held celebrations of things they called marriages does not mean they were actually celebrating marriages. Marriage is a legal contract to organize property and next of kin rights. It has no agreed upon meaning besides the legal one.
More to the point the question rest on whether the Baker has a legal duty to serve a gay couple’s marriage as such the legal definition has primarily position. Gay marriages did not exist in this country until 2003
And he still might have opened up before Colorado pass non discrimination law. It’s asinine to argue he consented, implicitly, to the very law he’s contesting in court.
He STAYED open, didn’t he?
Whereas, I see it, if after the anti-discrimination law passed, the baker thought he could still discriminate due to his religious beliefs as a public serving entity, he was full of shit, and should be punished to make sure all public serving entities actually serve the public in toto. Don’t go too liberturd on us. You just sound selfish.
And of course if anti-F-ism became common enough to cause significant inconvenience to those with F in their name, the list of protected classes could and should be extended to protect them.
FOR FUCK’S SAKE, PEOPLE: THE BAKER DIDN’T CONSENT TO OBEY NON-DISCRIMINATION LAWS. THE BAKER CREATED A CORPORATION AND THE CORPORATION DOES NOT GET THE BENEFITS OF CORPORATE LAW UNLESS IT ABIDES BY THE LIMITATIONS OF CORPORATE LAW.
See my separate post on the pervert justice blog, but every single person here that is arguing the baker did or didn’t consent to something is entirely missing the point and refusing to answer the real question here: Should institutional discrimination be protected by the government using corporate law to benefit institutions who discriminate, or should institutional entities which discriminate pay some penalty for availing themselves of the protection of the government while failing to serve the public interest, as decided collectively through representative lawmaking?
Spoiler: the answer if FUCKINGHELLNO.
So if we could please stop talking about how government-protected, special economic entities can’t be regulated when those regulations might benefit queers, that would be nice.
Nerd of Redhead:
“Don’t go too liberturd on us. ”
Will you STOP fucking using that word please? Are you aware of how and why it was constructed? It’s incredibly ableist, and I am sick of seeing it used on here (primarily by you these days, everyone else seems to have got the memo). Christ, you are hard fucking work NOR.
Ya, this seems connected to the idea that “the political correctness police” going to arrest them. So they have to secretly tell the truth in private, where the scary sjws won’t get them. (But hate speech should be tolerated, because no one has to be afraid of nazis, cringenazis, or other anti-sjws)
See also: the drive for diversity of opinion in academia, as if ideas are unfairly being excluded.
#9: Yeah, that’s the guy.
Hey, that was a while back! Why are physicists still around? Hasn’t everything been solved?
@Mike Smith:
I was actually careful to use the term “unions” when referring to what same-sex couples were celebrating (prior to federal and state universal legal recognition).
That having been said, the couple in the case in question had in fact been legally married in Massachusetts. So they were planning the celebration of their marriage.
The meaning is indeed contextual, given that different societies, countries, cultures, and even different states in the United States, have different concepts of what makes a marriage (eg, common-law marriage in some states). There’s even potential conflict between the federal and state concepts of marriage.
But if there’s no agreed-upon meaning, that doesn’t mean the term is meaningless; just that there’s a conflict between one cultural/legal/social system and another. Getting same-sex marriage recognized legally was an example of a the concept being harmonized at the federal and state levels.
@50
I guess, to use a canonical example, impressed sailors consented to their impressment because they refused to jump overboard.
Ugh, some of these comments are so cringy. You guys ought to at least listen to the podcast before forming such strong opinions about it.
Hairhead, Still Learning at 59 @ 25 wrote:
Sam Harris made this exact point during their discussion! He argued that, sometimes (e.g., during the civil rights movement), when prejudice is too pervasive to be overcome by social pressure, the government needs to step in. And then you called him an ass, because who cares what The Enemy actually says or thinks, right?
And all of you seem to be misinterpreting Weinstein’s “Intellectual Dark Web” to a degree that’s actually pretty comical.
KG, No 52, that’s exactly right. If I opened a business that refused to serve anyone with “F” in their name, the reason that would be low stakes is that every other business in town would be happy to take the business I turned away, so the only person who would really suffer for it would be me. However, if we woke up tomorrow to find that there was a massive wave of businesses not serving people with F in their name, so that people with F in their name really do find themselves economically disadvantaged, then at that point the balance shifts and making “F” a protected class might be a reasonable thing to do.
Crip Dyke, No 53, I also agree with you that if a business accepts government benefits, it loses the ability to complain about government regulation, at least up to a point. That leaves open the question, however, the rights of businesses that don’t incorporate.
Try reading for comprehension, TURD vs. “t*rd”. Liberturds are shit, not mentally slow. Show me your thinking isn’t shit by showing you will protect those not of your idiotology from your idiocy. Like those ride motorcycles and won’t wear helmets due to “freedom”. I have freedom from having to support someone because they wouldn’t take responsibility for their decision, like making me support them for the rest of their life since they didn’t have private insurance to cover that possibility that they mildly scramble their brains due to their stupidity.
Which are not at issue here, not least since businesses that don’t incorporate don’t exist. A natural person can do business, but that person is still a natural person and not a legal corporation.
Now if only you could go and read up on whether
a) the bakery in question in the current case is an extent legal entity recognized as a non-natural person and a corporation under the law, or
b) the bakery in question is the private enterprise of a natural person
You can read my blog, Pervert Justice for the longer version.
@53 Crip
People are not engaging that question because the S. Court settled that point of law in Hobby Lobby (and to a lesser extent Citizens United and half dozen other cases). There’s no way the court won’t graft the closely held corporation having the views of its owners onto this case. The line of argument you are pursuing is moot.
And more to the point if the Court was to rule the legal duty falls on Masterpiece Cakes not Philips and thus Masterpiece Cakes has to obey non-discrimination law it would be hot second before Philips disbanded the corporation and/or the Christian right law groups found a non-corporate business to use as a test case.
This in an ineffective punt on the central issue.
MHiggo @#46 links to two podcasts, and the page for the 2nd podcast links to “All you need to know to win an argument about the gay wedding cake case”, by Andrew L. Seidel, which has a useful point-by-point breakdown of all aspects of the case.
Crip Dyke’s post expands on the point Seidel makes about a business being required to abide by anti-discrimination laws, so that’s also germane.
And responding to thirdmill above:
Is homophobia a necessary component of a church/religious group? I think it might be possible to make a successful argument that it is not; that you are willing to serve non-homophobic churches, and therefore, the homophobia rather than the religion is what is being discriminated against.
I’ve now read the blog. There’s zero attempt to reckon with Hobby Lobby. Waste of time.
@Mike Smith:
You clearly didn’t understand what is being said. Thirdmill said, and I quote:
The entire blog post was very specific that this is not an intrusion on the baker’s conscience, because the baker isn’t being forbidden from discriminating, rather the representative democracy has decided that we want to encourage economic activity by creating fictional persons, but that in exchange for those economic benefits, the government requires those fictional persons to abide by certain regulations.
Thirdmill’s position that this is a violation of the right of an individual’s conscience is bullshit (though oft repeated: it doesn’t start with Thirdmill and I understand how someone ignorant of the law could think it had merit when it is so often repeated). Even the baker doesn’t allege that, per se. The baker alleges that this is forced expression. But the baker only alleges that in reference to the actual baking and specifically the decorating of the cake. If the baker subcontracts the work, the baker does not do the artistic work.
Thus, if you are familiar with the facts of the case and the claims that the baker is making, Thirdmill’s position isn’t about the court case at all, it’s about Thirdmill’s own attempt to find a moral line of legitimacy for marking off a boundary of behavior that seems to intrude on someone’s ability to remain consistent with one’s own conscience.
If you want my analysis of the case, then it still doesn’t have too much to do with Hobby Lobby, because the claims are different.
If you want my court-watcher’s opinion on how the justices are likely to rule, then Hobby Lobby is very relevant, but the claim is a different claim than in Hobby Lobby and the question asked of the court here is not the same as that asked in Hobby Lobby. If you failed to recognize that the baker’s claims were reflected in neither Hobby Lobby nor in Threadmill’s comment, that’s a reflection on you, not on the value of my blog post.
@61
Calling someone an idiot while defending yourself against a claim of using ableist language is the epitome of irony.
#67
Bless your heart and have a nice day.
Don’t be stupid.
That’s a completely groundless comparison. It’s like arguing that because you cannot be compelled to donate blood or an organ, therefore the government has no right to impose taxes on you. It’s not even wrong.
This would be more like a jurisdiction where no license was previously required for cutting hair, passing a law requiring barbers to be licensed. Someone can either go through the licensure process, or stop practicing the trade of barbering.
@69
What’s stupid about that? Denigrating someone for a lack of intelligence is pretty much ableist by definition.
If one insists on willfully misunderstanding “stupid” and its allies as a reference to anatomical/physiological cognitive capacity, maybe. However, one would then be the only person on earth with that understanding, making it a humpty-dumpty argument.
thirdmill@42 —
In the “gay wedding cake case”, two citizens felt it was a big enough problem to make a complaint, and then the Colorado Civil Rights Commission felt it was big enough to proceed against the cake maker, and later (when the cake maker lost the case and appealed) the Colorado Civil Rights Commission felt it was big enough to defend at Supreme Court level. The fact that you don’t think it’s important enough should not be the legal standard for what counts as actionable discrimination. And I’m not saying you’re an unreasonable person for thinking a cake refusal is pretty low on the scale of discriminatory acts. But that’s not the point. It was important to the gay couple (and if you read the background to the case, you can see that the cake maker’s behaviour was pretty execrable…and more importantly, he is getting a lot of legal and financial support from people whose agenda is to wriggle out of their legal obligations not to discriminate; the facts of the case might be about a wedding cake, there’s a lot more at stake legally).
From Amy Howe at the SCOTUS blog:
Clearly not – there are blogs on this network that consider stupid/idiot to be ableist and banworthy language (in this case, both the Atheist Experience FTB blog and the associated facebook group), so that’s hardly just me with that understanding.
Mike Smith
And that’s the fundamental difference right here.
I’m against discrimination, not just against discrimination against people like me.
Which is also where thirdmill’s argument fails. There is not only a “small harm” for the couple in question because they need to find a different bakery, there is a big harm to all of us when we accept that it’s reasonable for some people to walk a few extra miles to get some service the same as others, with an unclear limit on “extra miles”.
It’s, btw, the same line of argument forced birthers use when restricting abortion access via medically unnecessary procedures and waiting periods etc.
No. 64, you’re right that homophobia is not necessarily a component of being a church, and there are non-homophobic churches, but that doesn’t change the fact that churches that are homophobic are acting out of religious conviction. Hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings isn’t a necessary component of Islam either; in fact most Muslims have the same opinion of terrorism that the rest of us do. But that doesn’t change the fact that the 9/11 hijackers were acting out of their own religious beliefs. They did it because that’s what they thought God wanted the to do. And by the way, I really, really do not want the state deciding what is, and is not, true religion.
No. 66, Crip Dyke, the reason the baker is using forced expression as his argument, rather than religious freedom, is that caselaw pretty much precludes him from appealing to religious freedom. That argument is dead following Smith v. Oregon. If it weren’t precluded by caselaw, I have no doubt that would be his argument since it’s the more intellectually honest argument, and since it would be a more satisfying win for him and for the religious who really do believe their religion gives them a free pass from obeying the law.
Chrislawson, No 73, you are right that looming over this is the desire of some to do away with all protections for gays, and who view this as a first step. But I’m not persuaded by the slippery slope argument. For one thing, any decision about anything can potentially be a slippery slope to something else; it’s basically the same argument made by opponents of gay marriage who said it would lead to pedophilia and bestiality and people marrying their cuckoo clocks I can tell the difference between those cases, and we pay judges to do the same.
I wonder if these bakeries would refuse delivery of competitively priced supplies if the shipment person or others in supply chain were LGBT.
The absolute freedom types take taxation as theft and regulation as slippery slope to fascism. There should be a baseline social contract entailing social responsibility. Local and state governments already impose licensing and building code regulations among other things. If you exploit our infrastructure by benefitting from our roads to your business, our schools that educate your employees, and our emergency services (police/fire), you abide by an ever evolving common standard of decency that means you serve all of us regardless of your irrelevant personal beliefs about LGBT. If you don’t like that then opt out and leave the country whiny ass snowflake.
…I hear Galt’s Gulch is a wonderful privatized and regulation free zone to do business, but the founder was an atheist zealot.
thirdmill — can you really not tell the difference between a slippery slope fallacy like “gay marriage will lead to legalising paedophilia” (for which there is neither historical evidence nor theoretical basis) and discussion of the predictable consequences of a decision based on the observed behaviour and explicitly stated goals of the people behind this Supreme Court appeal?
But the argument has nothing to do with what is or is not “true religion” — it is whether bigots are a protected class. The bigotry may be religiously inspired, but the state is not trying to infringe on their right to be bigots (religiously inspired or no), or their right to have bigotry as part of their religion, but on whether it is acceptable for a business to refuse service to bigots solely on account of their bigotry.
To refer to another prominent case — no-one argued that Kim Davis’ religion was false because it included bigotry, or that she had no right to be a bigot because of her religion, but rather that she was required to do the job she had been elected to do regardless of her bigotry or the religious source of her bigotry.
thirdmill
No shit, Sherlock.
It isn’t about the government deciding what is and isn’t true religion*, it is the government setting rules for all that limit, yes indeed limit, what is an ok expression of that religion. And the USA is a place that is very friendly to those expressions, being one of the few countries that didn’t sign the UN conventions on the Rights of Children because it would interfere with parents’ freedom of religion.
But this still doesn’t touch upon businesses.
*Though, as hemidactylus has noticed, they are always very selective in their truthful following. Somehow you don’t hear about cases where they don’t deliver cakes for second weddings, or weddings where the couple has already children together, or with other people, and so on. Almost as if that consumer base was a bit too large to reject.
Amongst libertarians or the folks who think social justice progress is best left to the “market’s” invisible hand job, I think there is a Goldwater problem where someone in principle agrees discrimination is bad, but the other prima facie principle pushing absolute freedom overrules and causes them to overthink as Goldwater did on civil rights ca. 1964.
“The market” often fails us and should not be depended upon to cure social injustice or other woes.
@hemidactylus:
Yes, that’s one of the points that Andrew Seidel makes in the essay I linked to @#64.
Tweet o’ the day.
Sorry – wrong thread!
@83-owlmirror
I just went up and followed the link to that article. Thanks. Seidel caused me to struggle for more clarity on the belief vs action distinction. Where do we draw the line? Mormon polygamy was ruled against very long ago. But more recently we have:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Lukumi_Babalu_Aye_v._City_of_Hialeah
…where Santeria practitioners were able to continue ritual animal sacrifice, which many people would find abhorrent but Kashrut and Halal practices may also be questionable or we can go full on PETA veganism stance.
But the Seidel article goes toward actions vis a vis treatment of other people. “There is no religious right to infringe the rights of others.”
@thirdmill: There is no religious right to choose certain demographics as customers while excluding others when running a public business. One’s public business is not one’s religion, which is part of the reason why businesses don’t get exempted from taxes but places of worship do. A Christian book, for example, store sells books related to Christianity, they do not only sell books to Christians. A Christian book store cannot legally refused to sell a Hindu a bible.
People have a right to choose what products they sell. They do not have the right to choose which demographics they will and will not sell that product to. If a business owner doesn’t want to sell wedding cakes to x protected group, the solution is simple: stop selling wedding cakes to anyone.
To frame it in terms of a profession where one does, to a certain extent, get to choose one’s customers– law firms get to decide which cases they will and won’t take. A real estate law firm can’t be forced to take on a homicide case, that firm gets to refuse a case if they think they can’t win or if they have enough work already or because the client wants them to engage in illegal or professionally unethical action. What they don’t get to do is refuse to take a real estate law case because the potential client is a woman, even if the law firm owner’s religion explicitly states that women aren’t allowed to own property. This doesn’t mean they have to take the case of every woman who calls them up or walks through the doors, it means they must judge the merits of taking her case against the exact same criteria as they would if she was a man.
Bakeries are allowed to not make wedding cakes as part of their service. They are allowed to make every kind of cake except wedding, but if they don’t make wedding cakes then they don’t make them at all, and if they do they make them for every demographic. That’s the contract one enters into when one acquires a business license and opens a public business: one agrees to serve the public. Bakeries are also allowed to decline to make wedding cakes if they are too busy already, but they’re not allowed to use the excuse of being too busy whenever a customer of a specific demographic asks for their product, because that demonstrates a pattern of discriminatory behavior.
This is hard all of a sudden? Again?
@crip
That line of argument is bullshit. It’s a Hobson’s choice to say to anyone in exchange for limited liability you must accept all regulations passed with majority support and the business is wholly distinct in all manners from its owners. If that is the line you are going to take the govt could compel a Christian bookstore, if incorporated, to list the Bible as fiction because of truth in advertising. That’s abhorrent.
I don’t find the notion that because Masterpiece Cakes is separate from Philips for liability and taxes it must be separate from him in all other ways. Given the advantages incorporation grant small businesses basically have to to survive. To then say individuals have to accept all regulations come what may is to ignore how soft power can compel.
More to the fucking point this argument that a corporation is wholly distinct from its owners and as such any legal duty that falls on it *can’t* intrude on the conscience of its owners was rejected in Hobby Lobby. The cases are so similar on this front I’ll eat my Baez baseball if Hobby Lobby isn’t cited at some point.
Philips’ legal team is pursuing the forced expression argument because it’s the one most likely to work on Kennedy. However numerous briefs are taking the line being pursued here vis a vis Hobby Lobby. There’s a non trivial chance Philips wins not because of the forced expression argument but because of the numerous arguments made in other briefs simply applying Hobby Lobby.
@gil
Oh have you seen Wonder Wheel yet? Oh still refusing to see Allen films? But didn’t you say you’re against discrimination?
You’re not against discrimination. You are against specific forms of discrimination based on class. These are the same thing.
I would to be able to hang a sign that read “Southern Baptist need not apply and not welcomed” not because they are unlike me. But because they have spent years damaging my life prospects and they live an abhorrent lifestyle.
We all have ethical and aesthetical standards and we all discriminate against certain people. Neither Christians nor Dodgers fans are welcomed in my house. I’m sure MRA and Weinstein Company/Miramax fans are not welcomed in yours.
I only will lay down my right to deny services in commercial settings to Christians iff they do the same.
If Masterpiece Cakes wins the response shouldn’t be to try to get it overturned but to get Religions and political affiliation stricken from protected classes.
@70
Sigh. Older businesses are often except from certain laws because of being grandfathered in.
That he remained open doesn’t mean he consented to the regulation. He might still have to obey the law but be honest about forcing him too.
And for the record he stopped making wedding cakes, allegedly 40% of his business, so in a sense he did fucking close to try to appease people.
Should a Muslim bookstore be compelled to sell a Koran to a person (Christian, or other) who there’s strong possibility of them than (legally) burning it?
I don’t see how you can say no to the above while saying yes in the Masterpiece Cakes case.
Hey, mickey, do you think that one is even smart?
Not even you can be so stupid as to believe that buying is the same as selling, and that deciding not to sell a specific product is the same as not selling to a specific kind of people.
It’s also not going in your favour that you equate homophobia with not giving money to people credibly accused of child molestation.
There’s probably a few thousand movies I haven’t seen, quite many of them even films I’m actually interested in.
Yes.
The customer being an arsehole is a personal judgement, not a relevant factor of business.
Yay, running with goalposts.
Pffft, I bought bibles with the intent to shred them. What in the fuck does my intention have to do with being able to buy the books in the first place? If I go into a bookstore, choose some books, and take them up to the counter, and pay for them, then they are mine. No one has the right to interrogate me as to why I’m purchasing them, and I’m certainly not obligated to explain just what I plan to do with them.
A bookstore is in business to sell books.
@88
Uh, why? I don’t think people should be able to sell -rolls wheel- weasel teeth and claim that they cure cancer, so why should people be able to sell a book that they claim is non-fiction despite not being so?
@89
Yes, absolutely.
@Mike Smith:
You are failing, possibly deliberately, to distinguish between a random individual customer and an entire protected group. The question would be better framed as, can the owner of a Muslim book store decline to sell any Korans to a specific, protected demographic on the basis that that demographic might not uphold their religious tenets? No, they cannot, because the book store isn’t their private house nor mosque, and is therefore open to the public.
Besides which, a cake is not a religious symbol, it is food, and it is food offered to the general public as part of a contract with the state (or city, or county) to do business with the general public– not segments of the public who adhere to your particular religious tenets, the whole public.
If someone wants to only do business with members of their church who follow their church’s rules, there’s the option to do that in the informal and non-licensed function of a hobbyist, but if one opens a business to the public, one cannot choose one’s customers by demographic.
Onamission5:
Yep. Or, someone can go into a business of church supply or church catering. Someone could always try to hedge their bet by calling their shop ‘Biblical Bakery’ or somesuch, but even that would not give them license to discriminate on the basis of personal belief.
@94Ona
Philips isn’t denying services to gay people as a class. He’s baked things for the community in the past and more to the point he would refuse a wedding cake to two straight men getting married as well. (He explicitly said both)
@gil
I see no difference between buying/selling that’s morally relevant. You refusing to see Allen films is still refusing to enter into a commercial transaction because of moral objections.
More to the point I, and I suspect most people here, would very much not like having to provide services/goods to a person wear a Trump 2016 Trump the b**** shirt. I’m legally forbidden to do so because of political affiliation being a protected class.
It’s immaterial that viewing homosexuality as equivalent to pedophilia is an unsound position. Philips believes them to be wrongs. I don’t want to give the state the power to decide that question. Because it will be used as just one more tool to hurt queer people.
@vivec
It’s abhorrent because give Trump the power to declare certain scared texts false and not *real* religion and mosques will be shut down within a month. The state has no business deciding what religious text (if any) are true/false because good bye minorities and hello persecution if they have that power.
And for the record you should be allowed, legally, to behave in a homophobic way within certain limits.
And for the record I’ve been fired twice for being queer. (Probably).
Actually listening to the Harris podcast that part where he unfortunately enters Goldwater problem territory with Shapiro was in response to a fielded question in the Q&A (around 1:25:47).
https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/112-the-intellectual-dark-web
He is wrong to go there IMO. Sure there is importance of nongovernmental social pressures such as protest and boycott that can result in some degree of positive change, but as in the case with civil rights in the 60s South these private actions can be insufficient without government involvement.
In the future I wonder if people who take these free market approaches will have Goldwater regret in hindsight, if that was indeed the case for Goldwater looking back:
http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/84967-would-they-let-barry-goldwater-into-cpac
“Yet to Goldwater, the freedom so essential to his political composition meant complete freedom for the individual. Freedom for a woman to choose, freedom for gay Americans to live absent government scrutiny, and freedom to practice the religion of one’s choosing without fear of persecution. While Goldwater’s early record on civil rights were not as forward thinking, he later admitted he was wrong when opposing then embracing civil rights reform calling it “one of his greatest regrets.””
Harris earlier in the podcast launched into his kneejerk attack on the is-ought gap and the subsequent discussion had a Keystone cops dynamic especially with Shapiro coming from a pro Judeochristian moralistic bias. Weinstein may have had the upper hand but I would need to listen again.
But maybe there is some redemption for Harris. If you listen at around 1:53:50 he fields a question about sexism and feminism where Mr. Estrogen Vibe is saying he will be tackling this with female guests in an arc of upcoming podcasts. He alleges due to his lived experience in a female led upbringing to know a woman’s perspective but admits male shortfalls. He purports to take recent sexual harassment issues and the less recent Elevatorgate stuff where women are made to feel uncomfortable seriously. He says “men have a moral obligation not to be creeps”. So this coming podcast arc might be interesting.
Again, Mike, he is refusing to provide a service to people who don’t follow his religious tenets that he will provide to people who do. That’s discrimination on the basis of religion in matters of public business. “You don’t follow my religion therefore you cannot buy certain types of my services” isn’t a protected right* in publicly operated businesses, no matter how hard this sect attempts to make it so. If this was a restaurant that just so happened to have fewer menu items for gay people than for straight, but would serve them, would that make it okay?
*It is a protected right in personal matters. You don’t have to loan money to your cousin’s girlfriend even if your reasons are bigoted.
It is a protected right irt religious membership and houses of worship. Your church doesn’t have to accept LGBT people as members or support equality.
A publicly operated business is neither a personal matter nor a religious institution. This is not hard, we’ve been through similar before.
Well, mickey, I can’t help you there. That’s a pretty big amount of being stupid for the sake of appearing right.
I’d try “the nature of selling and buying 101”, or recommend cd’s nice post on the difference between natural persons and businesses, but you’re not worth the effort, but it is noted that you take my refusal to see films by someone credibly accused of sexually abusing a child* very personal.
*Though I cannot remember ever having seen an Allan movie, even before I heard of it. That was probably some horrible discrimination on my part already.
@96
That’s nonsensical. Whether or not a religion is demonstrably true doesn’t affect whether or not it is a religion.
I’m an atheist, for fucks sake, I don’t believe any religion is demonstrably true. The definition of “religion” doesnt necessarily require truthfulness.
MS, I warned you about being overly concerned with individual rights, rather than their responsibilities not to project their bigotry unto others, meaning the general public. You, at least, can shut the fuck up. I don’t think you can show you are really interested in those who are on the receiving end of said bigotry. And I don’t think you are really interested, due to “FREEDOM”.
Giliell:
I’ve had to suffer through two of them (both before the credible accusations). You aren’t missing a thing. Part and parcel of the pretentious bullshit of the art world.
Mike:
I won’t say you’re wrong to continue to discuss legal cases and arguments, because the thread goes where the thread goes, but if you read the original post by PZ in this thread, and if you read the original bit by Thirdmill, what was being argued was not whether or not Masterpiece Cakeshop would succeed or fail in certain legal claims, but whether or not Sam Harris is being an ass in saying that we as a community should tolerate discriminatory bakeries because the free market is always right, and if it’s the morally right thing to refuse to tolerate discrimination, then the market will refuse to tolerate it, problem solved.
Thirdmill asserted that we should have sympathy for the baker. I have argued, and others have argued, that while the sympathy we have for every fellow human should not be suspended, we should not have any particular sympathy for the baker in this case because the baker in this case is being an asshat and then demanding that they receive social benefits despite engaging in behavior that, as a representative democracy, we have decided to outlaw.
Now, if that violated some fundamental right that attaches to persons, then the fact that the law was passed democratically doesn’t mean squat. But the law only attaches to fictional persons.
So here’s the question: if the USA decided that it would not longer assign legal personhood to corporations, that companies simply no longer existed (maybe after a grace period and some compensation, let’s not fuss about how the transition is accomplished), would merely living in a nation without the option of creating a fictional corporation be a denial of some important human right? Economically it would be pretty stupid, but would it be a denial of a human right to leave humans responsible for their own actions and debts? Is that somehow fundamentally morally wrong?
If no, then a cake baker who decides to incorporate and then whines that the particular package of benefits and limitations in corporate law isn’t to their maximum advantage deserves no sympathy for that particular plight whatsoever.
People are arguing that we should have some special sympathy for the baker’s special plight. We shouldn’t. People are arguing that there’s no room for humans to act on their deeply held moral and/or religious beliefs, but there is plenty of room – don’t incorporate, create a private club as a special form of legal corporation, hell, many non-profits can sell things (including cakes) while having an advocacy position on one or more issues and cannot be compelled to act contrary to their non-profit mission. The baker could literally incorporate as a fucking church and be exempt from this law.
So when people are saying that there is no room to follow their consciences, those people are just flat out fucking wrong, as I demonstrated in my longer post. There’s plenty of room. Society provides plenty of different options. But the particular set of advantages that comes from having a for-profit corporation comes with a particular set of disadvantages. We should not be morally shocked that governments ask for a trade off of requirements that a business refrain from certain things that are not in the public interest in order to receive the special economic and legal benefits on offer.
it is not a morally shocking thing. There is no reason to think that Sam Harris is not an asshat, and there is no reason to reject the idea that Thirdmill put forward that society did not allow the baker room to perform baking while discriminating against queers. That room does exist. The baker chose not to take advantage of that room.
I don’t contest the baker’s right to file an action in court, but I for damn sure contest the argument that we should be feeling sorry for that baker.
@Mike Smith:
I may be wrong, but I am not sure that there is a legal requirement to label books in general as fiction or not. Books that include characters with the same name and background as real living persons in a narrative might need to include the standard disclaimer that the work is fiction in order to avoid libel lawsuits, and there’s probably something about health claims and similar requiring disclaimers that the claims are untested or whatever, but I don’t think anything otherwise is required.
One example that came to mind is Whitley Streiber’s Communion, which is even subtitled “A True Story”.
If you (or anyone) knows of some specific counterexample, I’d be interested to learn.
But even there, Owlmirror, you’re running up against compelled messaging.
What if some faith-healers with only a high school educations want to put “M.D.” after their names in the sign outside their windows? If they deeply believe that all healing comes from god and that it is immoral to pretend that a medical degree makes one a healer, then why shouldn’t they be allowed to say what they want with their own business’s money?
Why is it legal to force cigarettes to carry a health warning: they don’t claiming to be curing anything?
What if a pharmaceutical company believes that their medicine is safe enough for over-the-counter use and that scary “Consult your doctor” warnings will lead to less use of a beneficial medicine and thus poorer health outcomes? What if they believe that their god called them to heal as many people as possible? Can they then drop the “Consult Your Doctor” phrase from their advertising as compelled speech?
On top of Harris being an asshat and the over-used trope demanding sympathy for the poor baker stuck with no options except ALL THE OPTIONS, the legal case is dangerous in far, far too many ways. I didn’t like the outcome of the peyote case, but that had everything to do with the bullshit privileges given in law to destructive drugs like alcohol while destructive drugs like peyote are held to be too dangerous to ever touch. The actual decision made by the Oregon Employment Division was reasonable in context, it was the context that wasn’t reasonable. If SCOTUS had ruled for Smith in that case, it would have had similar (though perhaps even more far reaching) consequences to Hobby Lobby. The peyote case was a political, moral, and personal injustice that SCOTUS declined to ameliorate, though SCOTUS delivered probably the best decision the court could have made. Hobby Lobby was an abomination which gives us the practical decision that asking for a 1-2 page statement that you actually request a waiver is not minimally intrusive on the rights of the company. If the company can’t be required to ask for a waiver before a waiver is granted, then doesn’t that logically fuck up the entire law? What would be more minimally intrusive? It’s hard to know, and the case gives us few ideas about how it will function as precedent in the future.
Imagine a decision in Masterpiece that forbid the government from prohibiting discrimination or otherwise requiring some action in a way that a business argued compelled expression even when no particular language or message is compelled but only activity is compelled and the company argues it is activity from which some level of communicative intent might be inferred, although it would be inferred very differently by different people and can’t at all be said to be a coherent message.
What’s the limiting principle here?
yeah, again, not to belabor it, but Harris is an asshat. Since we seem to have moved on to an argument about the legal case before SCOTUS, however, let’s just address that: it’s a dangerously fucked up case with a stupid argument that should in no way garner sympathy for the baker or his company. We’re only in this position because quite a number of so-called conservatives are wiling to abandon constitutional principles and even principles of judicial interpretation at the drop of a hat in order to reach a decision that allows their preferred party to win and/or punishes a party they dislike.
No, I didn’t like the human outcome of the peyote case, but I have principles of interpretation to which I actually adhere and to which I can remain consistent enough to agree that (though I might quibble with some of the wording) the fundamental holding in Smith is sound.
Go ask a conservative going through a divorce why they shouldn’t be locked up by their state government for sex crimes should they ever again have a sexual relationship (or if they had one with a party to whom they weren’t married previously). Then ask them to apply those principles to the question of whether or not Bowers v Hardwick was rightly decided.
FSM Fuck ’em. Every one.
@106- CripDyke-
Harris is wrong to rely on the sufficiency of private means of social pressure to remedy social injustice. He realized government was necessary in the case of southern injustice in the case of civil rights decades ago. Protest and boycotts were insufficient then. But for some reason he doesn’t carry that lesson to the present day. We shouldn’t overlook the importance of said social pressures in shaming the powers that be. But it took a federal government to impose civil rights on state governments. Ironically that’s possibly an asymmetry going the wrong way with cannabis enforcement but I digress.
As much an asshat as he may be, if Harris owned a bakery would he be enlightened enough to make same sex marriage wedding cakes? I would hope so. His problem may be in projecting such acceptance on “the market” which is amoral at best.
@vivec
I can name several Christian lawyers who are choppy at the bit to declare Islam not a religion because it’s false. Or Mormonism isn’t a religion because it’s a scam. It might ultimately be nonsense but do you want Trump packed courts be able to begin approaching that line? I sure as hell don’t.
@gil
I brought up Allen because I knew you were boycotting. He’s immaterial to the underlying point. If you care to name another business you don’t shop at because of a moral objections name it. I’m sure there’s others.
And I’m sorry you don’t how similar buying is to selling. Both what you sell and what you buy are central to your life. We spend most of our time engaged in economic activity. There’s clear personal aspects to commercial activity. I’m at a complete loss to explain why you think “business!” dissolves the issue. A for profit Catholic hospital should not be compelled to perform abortions even if they should be compelled to treat a botched abortion.
@Ona
That’s not religious discrimination. Religious discrimination is refusing to serve Jews because they are Jewish
I’ve had this conversation a lot. I don’t think there’s any real way to say the line stops at the church door.
@Crip
You are offer religious objectors a Hobson’s choice. The benefits of incorporation are such compared to other arrangements that you basically *have to* incorporate if you have want to be able to compete in the market fairly. On liability issues alone the costs are basically prohibitive. Philips is basically be given the option of living his truth in his work in exchange for his material well being being crippled.
The notion that you must check your liberty of conscience at the business door has to be limited. If you think a business owner’s forever forgoes his liberty of conscience, that he must accept all regulations no matter how repugnant to him and harmless to others his actions would be because the system makes the only *reasonable* decision be incorporation I’m afraid we are at loggerheads.
The liberty of conscience is to central to freedom to think it’s tradable in that way.
@Nerd
Fuck you. I’m a faggot. I’ve gone back into the closet because of Trump being elected. I’m acutely aware of the harm this can do to me
And in case you fucking missed it I’m ultimately in favor of curtailing Philips’ liberty in this way because my liberty has been curtailed in this way since 1964. (And I think social stability requires people laying down economic boycott “weapons”)
So fuck you.
It may be the most ridiculous notion ever but if Sam Harris is genuinely going on an arc exploring sexism and feminism maybe he should invite Rebecca Watson as a guest. She might balk (or barf) at the idea. But it could be a way for Sam to get schooling on relevant issues. And maybe they have common ground on reason, evidence, and skepticism.
Mike Smith:
I have already shown that incorporating as a non-profit with a specific purpose, even a specific religious purpose, is an option that does not forbid selling cakes.
I have already shown that incorporating a private club where cakes are only sold to club members is an option.
Further, I think you’re a complete ass to say that choosing between publicly discriminating against queers and gaining the liability protections of incorporation would be a fucking Hobson’s Choice even if the only possible method of incorporation was a for-profit corporation bound by non-discrimination law and religious and other non-profits didn’t exist.
The government is offering very significant economic benefits, that’s true. But if you don’t take the specific package of benefits and limitations that come with for-profit incorporation, that doesn’t mean that you get nothing. Hell, there are even many different forms of for-profit corporation. This isn’t all-or-nothing. This is the freedom to balance many things, including access to business loans, maximizing short-term profit, personal liability indemnification, the chance to make a lot of cool cakes, the possibility of spreading the gospel of your particular religion, hating on queers, saving the paperwork of giving someone a “membership” in a cake club as a pro-forma way of pre-screening your cake customers when you would have charged them the same price for the cake in a for-profit or private enterprise as your membership+cake price in your private cake club, minimizing the weird stares you might get for telling people your cakeshop is technically a church … all kinds of things.
And there are so many ways to incorporate -or not!- that your idea that this is a Hobson’s choice (an “all or nothing” choice) is stupidly, facially wrong to the point of making me wonder if you are even attempting to be honest about the situation in play. Are you really unaware that there are multiple types of legal entities which operate under different rules, and yet all are able to pay salaries to the people who do the work of the organization? It may not actually maximize profit to incorporate your cakeshop as a church, but you get to be religious as fuck, discriminate as much as you want, collect a salary and give yourself raises when the church is doing well, and generally get everything you could possibly want except for minimizing the odd looks of people who find out that you availed yourself of 501(c) incorporation when you could have gone the for-profit route.
What is your problem admitting that this is IN NO FUCKING WAY an all-or-nothing choice?
@108
A sufficiently motivated bigot will twist whatever laws he wants into oppressing people.
The fact that a bigot might misuse a regulation to oppress people doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have regulations.
Bigots misuse hospita regulations to shut down abortion centers. Does that mean that we shouldn’t regulate hospitals?
@ Mike Smith, #108
A for-profit Catholic hospital may be the only healthcare provider a person has access to. People don’t get to choose their hospitals in the US, insurance companies do, and a huge number of hospitals in this country are religiously affiliated.
So no, a Catholic hospital should not have the right to refuse to perform abortions or sterilization, or provide emergency contraception. It places an undue burden on members of the community ostensibly served by such hospitals.
If the staff at such institutions can’t be bothered to do their duty, then the RCC would be very happy to have them bother God in their name. I understand there’s a shortage of priests and nuns- celibacy isn’t a big seller, these days. But surely the holier-than-thou types who wish to punish women for having sex (or being raped) won’t balk at a little thing like that.
@vivec
That a bigot can twist any law is no reason to hand them easily twistable laws. Allowing the state to weigh in on the truth value of religious claims is inviting mischief.
@crip
First I don’t find it at all radical that a person wishes to own a business and live thier professional lives according to their religious traditions. The issues only arises when a religious duty conflicts with general law. There’s nothing suspect about a person wishing to conduct thier commercial life in accordance with their comprehensive doctrine. I have zero problem with, say, Hindu folks refusing to purchase or provide beef as a religious duty. I’m at a complete loss to explain why you are hostile to even the notion of an incorporated business wishing to abide by religious duties generally.
Second let’s talk about incurred costs. The same sex couple being refused service results in them needing to find another baker. There very might be services, medical say, that are so rare that having to find another provider is too cumbersome. But I’m pretty fucking sure every grocery store sells cakes. The denial if service costs the same sex couple virtually nothing.
Conversely, if Philips was to follow the track you are recommending he is getting hit with a lot of additional costs. Religious non profits (or churches) are greatly hampered by what they can do with excess value. They can only hold so much in reserve and have to spend the rest. The IRS requires non profits to file public tax returns; this isn’t necessarily required of for profits. Further given that baking isn’t usually consider a religious duty Philips would be opening himself up to additional auditing by the IRS. Not to mention that services that a commercial bakery depend on, fire insurance for example or certain supplier deals, might be extremely cumbersome if not prohibitively expenses to extend to another arrangement.
Apparently it’s too fucking much to ask a same sex couple to find a different Baker. But it’s not too fucking much to ask religious conservatives to jump though god knows how much red tape and legal fictions to maintain their ability to live authentic lives.
More to the point asking anyone to play legal games to mask what they are actually doing is itself burdening thier liberty of conscience as not lying is usually a religious duty.
I can’t see the choice of “accept these benefits you need to compete fairly in exchange for obeying *any* regulation deemed necessary regardless of how repugnant you find it or being able to conduct you professional life according to your conscience but forgoing any benefits accorded to people not of your faith *and* additional restriction to how you entity functions.” It’s absolutely is a you can have the horse by the do or no horse at all.
Do = door I. The last paragraph.
Further I don’t at all see the distinction between a church and a business as a sharp one (despite what the law might currently say). It’s just as conceivable that a same sex couple might be unable to find a chapel to rent (or whatever) for their wedding as unable to secure a bakery for the same. I see no strong reason to think the harm done to the same sex couple is any different in either case.
You asked before Crip why should any corporation be exempt from general law. That’s the wrong question. The right question is why should we think businesses’ liability protections should be tied to other considerations.
@112
Catholic hospitals are not required *now* to provide abortion services. There’s zero chance of it ever happening.
If the issue is a question of access it makes more sense to require insurance companies to carry an abortion provider which generally the case.
And oh refusing to facilitate abortion isn’t punishing women who have sex. If I, hypothetically, refuse to donate to planned Parenthood because of abortion I’m not denying (and therefore not punishing) anyone. No person seeking abortion is entitled to my help. Even the most radical pro choice position I can think of requires that I don’t I interfere with abortion services and *someone* provides them.
mickey
As mentioned, I’m not sure if “I’ve never seen any of his movies and I’m not interested in seeing them now” can be constructed as a boycott. Unless you believe that I have some sort of duty to spend money on his films. I’m also not offering to pay money to watch films to an undifferentiated group of filmmakers. That doesn’t even make any sense.
Similar is not the same. And don’t lie, you’Re not sorry.
You consistently fail to understand the different between natural and legal persons. Uhm, and, not really. You’re seriously arguing that the decision t buy macceroni instead of a million different pasta shapes is central to my life?
Yes, clearly, when I went grocery shopping at Aldi yesterday, that was a very personal transaction between me and the woman at the check out. It had nothing to do with a multi billion dollar business. If that woman at the check-out holds some sincere religious beliefs against fat people she is entitled not to sell me chocolate. Because it’s about her.
Yeah, Havita Hallapavanar was just a b*tch who had it coming.
And the doctor and the patient are really just the same.
Should the catholic hospital be allowed to refuse to treat gay people? Unmarried mothers? People who are re-married? Or is it just that you’re fine with women (and others with uteri) being punished for having had sex?
You claim you have been fired for being gay. I suppose you’re ok with that. And if nobody wants to rent a flat to you, well, that’s not an issue either, right? And if the homeless shelter doesn’t let you in, well personal beliefs, eh?
@118
While this is you attempting at sarcasm, you have actually correctly summed up my view on the matter. Good job!
You seem to keep conflating “abide by their religion rules” with “discriminate against protected groups”.
I am confident that Hindus refusing to buy or sell beef are not discriminating against any protected group.
As much as the Beef Board [or whatever the trade group is called] might prefer it, no-one can be compelled to buy their product.
Following up from the unarticulated accusation that people had misunderstood the phrase “intellectual dark web”, I tried to find the true meaning without sitting through the two hour Sam Harris podcast. So I listened to the podcast PZ linked to.
Near the last quarter of that, it gets a quote and all that. If I remember correctly, it was a bit different than my previous guess here. Instead of the dark web being people hiding from thought police, supposedly it’s just that not enough people choose to listen to them or know who they are, or something. So instead of saying the dark web members have acted to separate themselves from the outside world, the act/blame is attributed to the outside culture. Something like that. I mean, I wish the ideas I liked were more known and impactful too, so welcome to the club. If I remember correctly.
In my search, I also discovered that Ben Shapiro (who talks twice as fast as anyone should be allowed to talk) made a book called Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America, and one called Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth.
So, ya.
“to live authentic lives”
Hmm, when I have to do things at work that I don’t want to, is that decreasing my ability to live authentically? If so, can I stir up an international controversy over it?
Btw, how can somebody consistently fail to grasp the difference between “not providing one of many varieties of x” (in this case meat that comes from a cow as opposed to pig, lamb, chicken,…), “privately not consuming x” (some films, meat, pork, your partner’s ass) and “offering product x for purchase to the public but refusing to sell it to a certain group within the public that is also a protected class”?
Btw, it’s just a cake, right?
Jesus Fuck, you’re dimmer than midnight. No one is obligated to buy meat. No one is obligated to buy anything, including movie tickets. No one is obligated to provide meat. If someone opens up a business, with a social contract to serve the public, and what they offer is beef, as in a steakhouse, then they must serve that to all customers, without bias.
Giliell:
Oh gods, those poor women. My heart goes out. When you see that, you see what christians are like, fuck, anyone who had the slightest sympathy for those asshole christians, it should dry up instantly.
Caine @ 123 wrote:
Really? All Christians? Tell me: What are all Muslims like?
Your bigotry and hypocrisy are nauseating.
Mike:
You have said that Phillips was facing a “Hobson’s Choice” – an all or nothing situation in which one’s choices were unfairly limited to a take-it-or-leave-it scenario.
This references the apocryphal story of a horse breeder and seller who would take your money and give you the horse nearest the barn door, regardless of which horse you actually wanted.
You have said, using your Hobson’s Choice language, that the baker had the choice of incorporating in a way which subjected the baker to anti-discrimination law or not incorporating at all.
You were wrong.
I accept that you have other arguments about why incorporating a certain way is desirable. However, you have made an assertion that the position that I am taking is to tell the baker that it is possible to have liability protection at the cost of full accountability under anti-discrimination laws, or not have liability protection at but have no accountability under anti-discrimination laws.
I am not Hobson. I’m not saying that the baker should be told what type of corporation is available based on which form is on top of a stack. “It’s an S-Corp or nothing, sorry. Though I suppose you could come back next month and try again,” would be a Hobson’s Choice.
You can have all the liability protection you want (and we don’t even know that this was a priority for the baker, but let’s assume it was) AND all the freedom to discriminate you want, at the cost of some extra paperwork or loss of most of your freedom to determine distribution of assets on liquidation or whatever.
I have very specifically spelled out that the idea of all-or-nothing is bullshit. Maybe you don’t like your options. Maybe you prefer one over another. That doesn’t mean you don’t actually have any options.
Therefore, your “Hobson’s Choice” language is obviously, completely wrong. It is simply counter-factual.
You refuse, every time you respond, to actually acknowledge that this simple, basic point which you put forward is wrong. I’m willing to move forward on other arguments, but if you won’t acknowledge obvious factual errors, how do I trust that your less obviously true-or-false statements, including opinion arguments, are anything but trolling bullshit if when your factual errors are pointed out you cling to them in the face of overwhelming evidence?
Admit error, update your arguments to account for that error, and we can have a productive conversation. Cling to your obvious errors in the face of overwhelming evidence and you only prove that conversation with you is fruitless.
Also, out of the tens of thousands of churches in the US, name 3 that have been investigated by the IRS in the last 2 years.
Audited? Seriously? Pfft.
hookflash:
Did I say “when you see what every single christian on the planet is like”? Didn’t think so. That said, I have zero sympathy for all those christians who claim to be about love and peace, who label themselves moderate and liberal. Why? Because those assholes are the foundation the fanatics rest on. They share the same beliefs, and they can’t get away from that. I have said, time and time again, I’ll wait until there’s a massive movement, to take ‘christianity’ in all its splintery sects, away from all the hateful asshole christians. Tell me, what are they doing about that? I already know: nothing.
As for muslims, why would I be talking about them in regard to a lawsuit which involves asshole christians? By the way, you ignorant ass, abrahamaic religions: Judaism, Islam, Christianity. It’s all the same shit, same god.
Hookflash Context]/a> is a place in France.
Caine @ 127 wrote:
My point wasn’t that we should turn this into a Muslim bashing thread. My point was that you guys never seem generalize about Muslims the way you do about Christians. There’s a double standard going on here.
Yes, ignorant ass though I may be, I am acutely aware of this. I just think we should hate all the Abrahamic religions, per se, equally, and avoid statements like:
“When you see that, you see what [Muslims] are like, fuck, anyone who had the slightest sympathy for those asshole [Muslims], it should dry up instantly.”
Don’t you agree?
@crip
That you disagree with my characterizing it as a Hobson’s choice doesn’t make it a factual error. Like yeah trying to pass a bakery off as a church could cause it to be audited even if the chances is very low. A Hobson’s choice isn’t just an all or nothing choice. It’s also a “choice” in which a person only has one rational option. That the other options are phantom ones.
You are asking Philips to either cripple his liberty of conscience for the efficient running of a commercial enterprise or cripple the efficient running of a commercial enterprise to protect his liberty of conscience. That absolutely feels like an choice in which the options are phantom ones.
Regardless of that if the characterization of it as a Hobson’s choice is a sticking point, fuck it this is boring let’s just call it an unfair choice. The point is you are imposing on Philips an extremely costly choice in effort, time and dignity just to prevent a same sex couple for having to find another fucking bakery.
I don’t care what you call it, it’s an unfair devil’s bargain.
@gil
Do you boycott any product or company? Or do you only make purchases on price considerations? I don’t care if Allen ended up being a bad example. I doubt you have never or would never boycotted anything. Address the underlying point that everyone makes economic decisions based on moral standards.
Likewise asserting that buying is morally different from selling doesn’t make it so. How the fuck is it morally different?
I’m not ok with being fired for being gay *only* because my ability to discriminate against Christians is curtailed in that way.
Likewise because I don’t want to be assaulted or killed or get into protracted pissing match I wouldn’t rent from a landlord who would discriminate against queer folks if allowed to. Likewise the salvation army is currently required to serve queer folks where I live. Given that they famously are anti-queer I wouldn’t be safe(est) in their shelters.
Forcing people to act against thier conscience, even if justified, breeds resentment. Resentment gives us Trumpianism. There’s more religious conservatives than queer people. If allow them to discriminate against me in commercial settings prevents them from rounding us up to kill us I’m completely in favor of being openly discriminated against.
If commercial activity has no real meaning on our lives 80% of the time we are doing meaningless shit. Of *course* shopping at Aldi (as opposed to another store) and buying *this* foodstuff can have personal import.
My family is Polish and French and last year we lost the last two grandparents. The grandparents often provided the desserts for the holidays. I decided to bake for my family two traditional desserts, one Polish and one French. When I was shopping for the needed foodstuffs was I doing something personally meaningful or just shopping? The answer is both. The line between commercial activity and personal life isn’t sharp.
@Caine
When did Philips sign this so called social contract? I don’t think you have any idea how to generate the legal duty.
@Crip
Recently, from memory, you have Trump having the IRS investigate church of sciencitology (sp?) For maintaining their tax exempt status. You have the Edwards couple from Virginia using religious non profit for tax evasion being charged. And the Anglican Church us facing g a possible audit because of pro life advocacy.
Auditing churches and religious non profits is rare. It’s not unheard of.
@130
The problem being what now?
I respect a gay couple’s right to not be discriminated against more than I respect the religious freedom of a bigot to doscriminate against them.
What you call an “unfair choice” or an “extremely costly effort”, I call “things working the way they should”
Also again Crip I ultimately don’t care if you agree with me on the Hobson’s choice characterization; even if it’s more a Morkin’s fork or an unfair dilemma. But one of the reasons it feels like an all or none to me is liberty is a unified thing. Whatever feature of humanity that allows them to worship any or no gods is exactly the same thing that allows people to select thier career paths.
It really does feel like you are telling Philips he must accept his liberty being crippled in some way (all ways deemed necessary by the majority) or get no societal benefits.
Maybe you don’t feel this fine whatever. We can move along on the premise that it’s a grossly unfair choice. Because again asking a same sex couple to find a different baker is *somehow* too difficult but it’s not too difficult for Philips to play 6 degree of legal separation.
Your position absolutely feels like you want the state to side against people who view homosexuality/Queerness as immoral. I have no desire to give the state the power to weigh in at all the question of the morality of homosexuality. I can think very little that would be more damaging for queer people.
@vivec
I cut that differently but if you go back my original post I stated that I thought left/liberals would do better to admit yes they are curtailing liberty. Crip and others are not arguing that curtailing Philips’ liberty is better than not; they are arguing that he doesn’t have the right is claiming. While your position, I think, is wrong it’s intellectually honest.
And problem with your position is it’s basically inevitable that the state weighing on issues of conscience in that manner will have the tools to oppress people. Right now AZ and NM Republicans are using anti-discrimination policies to try to end ethnic studies and Latinx studies.
This shows you miss the point. Society, not Phillips, decides how he should run his business. Who the fuck is Philips, and where is his authority, to supersede the decisions of the duly elected state/federal legislatures? Where is his signed letter from his imaginary deity? Otherwise, it all comes down to his presupposed bigotry. Which should never triumph.
Mike Smith, it’s one thing to defend this abstract need for people providing services to discriminate, but I doubt you’d make similar arguments on the same basis about (say) police not attending crimes, or firefighters not attending fires, or paramedics not attending injuries, or bus drivers not accepting fares, or… well you get the idea.
(You can easily prove me wrong, of course, with a mere assertion :) )
@Mike Smith:
I am pretty sure that “liberty being crippled” applies only to his liberty to discriminate against protected groups, and “societal benefits” applies only to the economic benefits of incorporating as a business. I’m sure that Crip Dyke will correct me if I have misstated things.
Do you think that there should be no protected groups?
It’s not about the cake per se; it’s about a business having to abide by the law regarding discriminatory business practices.
I am baffled that you keep on not getting it.
Once again: Do you think that businesses should be allowed to have discriminatory practices against any group at all; that a business should be allowed to discriminate against any race, sexuality, gender, or religion that they choose too, as long as the business owner has a sufficiently religious conviction that that discrimination is mandated?
Wait, what?
@John Morales, with a CC: Mike Smith*2:
I’m sure that Mike Smith will say that those are not the same things*1 as private bakeries, but it’s exactly the all-or-nothing view that causes me to reject Mike Smith’s argument.
Permit me to quote.
“Liberty is a unified thing” and the argument as a whole works as well for a publicly employed police officer as it does for a private baker. Are we denying ALL THE LIBERTY to every police officer or bus driver hired simply because their best talents lie in a field that is typically funded by government? If liberty really is unified, then shouldn’t asking for, say, a little extra paperwork in order to gain the freedom to discriminate while maintaining liability protections (as would be the case with a cake club rather than a public bakery) be opposed with exactly the same – no more, no less – vigor than we would oppose the US military deciding that only white people would ever get promotions, and all people of color would remain e-1s or o-1s forever.
I find that position repulsive.
@Mike Smith:
Liberty in a society is never absolute, never all-or-nothing, and if one believes that we’ve struck the wrong balance in an area, that’s not the same thing as doing something entirely incompatible with a just-yet-human society.
Imagine one’s conscience preventing one from abstaining from intervening in a violent confrontation. I think we agree that we would rather have more people trying to stop violence than less. And yet, does that mean that taking up the defense of another entirely prevents tort claims? Of course not. The right to defend ourselves or others has limits.
The right to discriminate also has limits. There are many, many ways that one can legally discriminate. I have illustrated some. There are more, I’m sure. It also changes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Theoretically, the baker could also move to a different state. I think that’s rather more onerous than forming one’s business around the legal requirements of a private club, but if the baker has friends and family in another state and can settle the dispute with regulators for no fine if a sale of the business is accomplished in a certain time frame (not an unusual occurrence), then maybe a baker who didn’t plan ahead and is already facing potential fines would feel that moving is a better option, and if that’s a better option for that person, who am I to object?
An all-or-nothing conception of freedom is, quite literally, childish. As soon as two people exist in the same area, right are bound to come into conflict. Governments are instituted, in significant part, to solve the conflicts of rights. It is impossible to pass a law, then, that doesn’t limit some moral freedom or moral right.
I have asserted that it is simply false to say that there is no room for freedom of conscience in a country with anti-discrimination law. Some (like you, Mike Smith) may find anti-discrimination laws repugnant to their own conceptions of justice. However it is factually false to say that there is no room for such freedom of conscience unless one does as you do and imagine any intrusion on liberty as the revocation of liberty entire.
I have never argued that there is no curbing of liberty, and my position is intellectually honest. My position is that we are curbing liberties by degree, and that the baker has more options than being destitute on the street and obeying a law that violates their conscience by performing expressive work on behalf of queers. I note that you never did address the subcontracting option – if the queers moving on to another bakery is such a minor inconvenience, why is passing the order on to a subcontractor such an intolerable violation of liberty?
My position that we are curbing liberty by degree, and that this is inevitable under any form of government, is in direct conflict with your conception of liberty as a unity. This is the heart of the conflict, not an inconsistent refusal on my part to acknowledge the removal of liberty.
I am unsympathetic to the baker’s claims because with my education I can perceive many ways that the baker could gain access to liability protection, business loans, the ability to hire and fire subordinate employees without having to maintain a personal escrow account to cover payroll costs, and the freedom to discriminate at the same time. Yes, you give up other things, but if liability protection is so vital that it is a right – which is one of several things you seem to argue – then why does a person have to petition to create a corporation at all?
From you, earlier:
So what, then is the limiting principle? In a world where liberty is a unity, there is none. If the business owner has the power to reject one regulation which offends the business owner’s conscience, the business owner has the power to reject any and all regulations.
I don’t say that someone must accept all regulations. First, even if I believe a suit should lose, the freedom to file that suit is an important consideration limiting political and legislative overreach. I strongly support the baker’s right to file. Second, the constitution sets limits on what regulations may be rejected.
In Heart of Atlanta, the power to regulate certain commerce permitted the federal government to enforce anti-discrimination laws. The even less controversial right of state and local governments to regulate commerce the permits the same. We’ve known this for decades now.
We also know that the consequences of permitting discrimination are quite dire. The market doesn’t clean this up. Sometimes a discriminatory business dies, but other times discrimination spreads and becomes entrenched, expected. You focus on the problems of one couple switching stores once. The government in question was focussing on the problems that may occur if discrimination is permitted to flourish, with all the potential conflict that entails. Matthew Shepard’s murder occurred because of the decisions of 2 violent jerks, but it was made possible by a social milieu that devalued queers generally, and specifically gay men. What cost to the community of the negative media attention? What cost to the state the lifetime incarceration of the perpetrators? If the contribution of letting an environment of commercial discrimination to flourish was just 1 part in a thousand, and if the government has the constitutional power to pass anti-discrimination laws, then is the government better served by passing a single broad law or dealing with discrimination case-by-case, which might allow friends of the mayor to get away with more discrimination or lower fines than the less-well-connected?
You’ve seen riots in the US in your lifetime. While some are entitled sports fans, no few are apparently the legacy of historic discrimination that has yet to be fully uprooted. It became really, really fucking entrenched, and we are now paying the price.
Governments have decided that they don’t want to risk passing these costs to their community’s children. They have the constitutional right to do so. Bakers, and others, who wish to personally discriminate can take jobs in large bakers, subcontract out work that they hate from their own bakeries, choose to forgo liability protection, or choose from a number of weird but legal incorporation scenarios. They can do this while the community as a whole maintains a stance against institutional discrimination.
I find this meets my expectations for justice. There are many ways such public accommodation laws could go too far (in my view) – applying anti-discrimination laws to churches, for instance.
Yes, this is a constraint on freedom. No, a baker (or anyone) shouldn’t have to abide a constraint that violates the constitution. No, I don’t think this does, though my opinion counts for squat. Yes, a baker should have to abide a constraint that is consistent with the constitution even if it violates someone’s morality, because we all have different moralities and every law violates someone’s sense of morality. Maybe you think you shouldn’t have to pay parking meters on public streets, I don’t know, but we’re either a nation of laws, or we aren’t.
If freedom is a unity, then we aren’t.
Personally, I don’t think even you believe that, which makes your assertion that I’m the one being intellectually inconsistent more than a little amusing. But maybe you do. If you do, buy yourself an island, and have fun. Those of us who interact with each other will continue to do the messy work of limiting each others’ freedoms by degrees in order to find the best possible compromises our current societies can manage.
*1: and for some cases would probably point out that most of what you’re talking about are government services, despite the existence of private ambulance companies and bus services that contract with governments to provide public transport, etc. I agree with the fact that government services are different, but I don’t think that the fact that most of the services you list are government provided most of the time means your list isn’t useful since at least some of them are privately provided at least some of the time.
*2: Mike Smith, I hope you don’t take it oddly that I’m using your entire internet handle. I usually do that, trusting people to name themselves what they want to be called, but when it mirrors a potential real life first/last it can seem awkward choosing that instead of “Mike” or “Dr. Smith” or whatever.
I’ll respond to the rest in detail later but yes police are denied liberty entirely as agent of the states are never at liberty to do anything according their conscience. Their duties are entirely creatures of law. Businesses are not.
And I have repeatedly laid out the limiting principle I follow of people laying down an aspect of their liberty (or not)they agree to the restriction or the extend the privilege to all others to behave the same way.
Either restricting Philips’ liberty to discriminate against me OR granting me my liberty to discriminate against him would satisfy my conception of justice. What’s repugnant about Philips’ position isn’t that he wishes to have his liberty of conscience at work it’s he would deny me the ability to do the same.
I feel like we talked past each other a lot.
mickey, You’re so dense, lead would float.
Well, I would never eat whale meat, I don’t buy cheap mass produced trinkets that mimic indigenous arts, I’d love to boycott Nestle but then I’d starve…
And no, Allen didn’t end up as the example by chance. He was mentioned again because you, who’s been arguing for people’S right to discriminate got so upset about me not wanting to watch Allen movies that it is obviously still bothering you months later.
I have given quote a lot of examples. You denying them doesn’t make them go away.
Which is, as stated before, the fundamental difference between me and you. I’m against discrimination. You are just upset that you’re lacking the power to do so.
You’Re free to freeze to death*, which is why you, as a consumer, can choose not to rent or not to go to a shelter, but other queer people may feel like they’d like not to be homeless.
*The flippant way in which you dismiss seems to indicate that you don’t think that may be a problem for you personally, so fuck others.
Says the person who would love to make christians as miserable as he could if only he had the power…
Dude, I spend 30% of my time asleep. Even if we characterise all time spent earning money as commercial and all time spent shopping, that amounts to roughly 20% of my time (30% work Mo-Fri on average, 90-120 min shopping)
Dude, the fact that you needed to bring up two dead grandmas and some specialised foodstuff and the holidays to present one example of personally meaningful grocery shopping should tell you everything.
But two points:
1. Nobody has ever argued, that the act of shopping cannot be personal and important. The argument is that it mostly isn’t.
2. To the people selling you the foodstuff, you were just another rando. To the business as a legal person, your whole interaction boils down to numbers.
Buying my wedding rings was intensely personal, but selling them wasn’t. Buying our house was very personal both for us AND the couple who sold it, but for the real estate agency brokering the deal?
+++
BTW, not being familiar with the term “Hobson’s choice” I looked it up. What a sensible dude that Hobson was. I agree with him.
@gil
Whale meat it is. Insert whale meat when I mentioned Allen as Allen is immaterial to my point. I just happened to know you weren’t watching his films. Oh and fuck you for importing intentions on to to me that weren’t there
I don’t know a single queer person who would volunteer to stay at a salvation army shelter as it’s unsafe. My point wasn’t I would choose the street. My point was non-discrimination law doesn’t actually protect me
It’s not at all that hard to imagine a brokerage taking personal pride in helping people find homes.
I selected the holiday example as I thought you could relate. What occurred to me at first was my Cubs (baseball team) fandom is the most important thing in my life. That is entirely a commercial enterprise. Buying Cubs stuff is intensely meaningful to me…I’m also sure that for a lot of the players/others it’s intensely meaningful as well.
I’m not convinced there’s any principled way to determine what commercial activity is personal or not. You’re acting like it’s an alien thought to take pride in one’s work.
I’ll make the point about discrimination starkly. Is Paul Elam (or to stay in the thread Sam Harris or Been Shaprio) welcomed in your home?
Every refuses to associate with certain people. You might be against discriminating against certain people by class but no I don’t believe anyone is welcomed in your life.
When your sleeping your consuming products…and commercial activity includes reading books playing games engaging with media etc. Because at some point you entered into a this for that transaction.
Virtually everything under capital is commercial.
@owl
Yes my arguments apply to any protected class. I’m at work but I’ll have a long post about this.
1. My home = private property of a natural person.
2. Elam and Shapiro are misogynist assholes. That is not a protected class. Nobody ever argued that businesses don’t get to decline business based on individual issues like somebody getting kicked out of a bar after groping the server.
Your poor attempt as gish gallop is noted.
Failure to distinguish between generally liking ones job and assigning significant personal meaning to each and any interaction in that job.
1. I’m sorry.
2. Players/fans = natural person.
Cubs = business.
Yet again you need to reach for a highly specific and atypical example yet still you fail to make your point.
For the person selling you an overpriced shirt, you’re probably completely forgettable and the business “Cubbs” wouldn’t notice if you dropped dead unless you did it in a stadium.
At no point have I ever said everyone desires to discriminate based on class (protected or not) but that everyone wishes to discriminate in some way
Your desire to keep misogynistic assholes out of your life, I think, is ultimately indistinguishable from a Christian’s desire to keep gay people out of theirs. Both are based on ethical considerations. Are you in favor if forcing Christians to be friends with gay people? I’m going to have a longer post about this after I sleep but do you think any *discrimination* should be legally permitted? Should a church being forced to hold a gay wedding.
While yeah your job can be a bore at times my argument doesn’t depends on it being intensely meaningful at all times. It only requires that some one would describe it as very significant. More to the fucking point, romantic relationships are clearly intensely meaningful and personal. They also contain moments of boredom and nonmeaning.
Fuck you for your judgemental attitude about my fandom. Furthermore you are wrong about it being atypical. Rapid fandom of something (an artist, an author, a TV show, a band a movie, a team etc.) Is extremely common and a shit ton of people find meaning in it and for the record community. The Cubs wouldn’t care (know) if I dropped dead but all my friends would sure as hell miss me ranting about them.
The Cubs world series parade was the largest gathering of humanity in the Americas ever at an estimated 5 million people. But yeah I’m atypical for viewing them as significant part of my life.
Mickey, this discussion ends here.
You are either unwilling or unable to engage the presented arguments in a meaningful and honest way.
Also I’m not judgemental, I’m honestly sorry that your friends and family are less important for you than a capitalist enterprise dressed up as a sports team.
Mike Smith, #144
I can’t believe I’m having to explain this, but here goes:
The misogynistic assholes are being kept out because of their harmful words and actions. The gay people are being kept out because of (just one aspect of) who they are.
Look how ridiculous this sounds:
Your desire to keep misogynistic assholes out of your life, I think, is ultimately indistinguishable from a white person’s desire to keep black people out of theirs.
Being gay is part of who a person is; it’s not a ‘lifestyle choice’. People are not inescapably misogynistic or assholes. That said, assholes, misogynistic or otherwise, are served in a variety of ways by public businesses, every minute of every day. There’s a reason that shop work is known as retail hell.
A religious person can keep queer people out of their personal lives and out of their place of worship. They cannot, however, refuse services to them in their public business. How many fucking times does this need to be said before it penetrates the black hole your petrified brain is hiding in?
But what if someone deeply believes that gay people are reptilian shape-shifters, secret enemies of humanity? Is it essentially the same as my desire to keep misogynistic assholes out of my life?
Gil feeling sorry for me because I have different *values* is judgmental. I don’t think family is worth very much. Oh and i don’t hate capitalism
Anyway I really think we got in the weeds and I’m going to try to present my objections clearer because I really feel like I’m talking past people.
To begin let’s begin by setting up three types of associations. There’s the very personal level of friends and family. There’s then the community or private level which be clubs and churches. Finally there’s the commercial level that concerns the buying and selling of material goods.
I don’t think anyone would object to freedom of association being near absolute at the personal level with the only constraint the state cares about is all parties involved consented. To be explicit about this I don’t believe anyone would argue the state should require people to have black friends or more starkly date black people. It’s hella racist and bigoted to catergorically reject black people from friendship but it seems extremely difficult to generate a legal duty to befriend them. (Same for any protected class)
The private level is similar but comes with additional restriction on form such as having to be a nonprofit.
The commercial level is where the debate is happening but the central debate’s sticking point is that incorporated business are not natural persons and their benefits means trading accepting certain constraints for them.
As far as I can tell Crip’s (and yours?) argument is two fold. 1) the harm done to a protected class by allowing discrimination in a commercial setting (gay people buying a cake in this case) is not trivial. It can greatly hamper the material well being of unpopular minorities, maybe even practically locking them out of the market which the should have equitable access too, and this is not easily remedied by market forces. 2) the person wishing to discriminate against protected classes doesn’t have a claim on freedom of association (or liberty of conscience) because either the legal duty falls on the incorporated business not the owner OR the owner prioritized other aspects of liberty (like profit maximizing) in exchange for accepting certain constraints (or structuring) of other aspects of liberty. In short, the person who wishes to discriminate against protected classes wants to have his cake and eat it too. (Excuse the pun).
I believe that is a fair, if short, rendering of the argument. If I have rendered the argument unfairly than yes we are at loggerheads because I can’t understand you.
My response is two fold. 1) the harm caused to protected classes is both overstated in practice and harm is not enough to override in the non-commercial cases. Protected classes are not given from on high, indeed it’s not even the case that sexual orientation is always a protected class (this debate couldn’t have arisen from Texas). As such any jurisdiction that’s able to pass anti-discrimination policies for X class must have *already* enjoy close to majority support of equal access to the market place for that class. Alabama needs to enforce equal access to the market place for gay people not California. Yet California is the one that has the anti-discrimination law. More importantly family (or friend) rejection is as damaging as any single act of discrimination in the market place. It’s *legal* in Colorado for a family to not leave any property to gay child because they are gay. Indeed at after a gay child turns 18 the family has no legal duty to support them in *any* way.
It’s also easy to generate hard cases for private level in that what if a gay couple wants to marry in a chapel but none if the legally incorporated churches wish to serve them?
I’m unclear on why harm is so much more decisive in commercial cases.
2) the distinction between the owner and the business is not sharp post Hobby Lobby. And second the notion that a commercial enterprise (with its benefits) is a fair trade off for conditioned (ie restricted) liberty of conscience and/or freedom of association is predicted on a series of judgements on the nature of the good. I.e. you working life is less important than your personal life ultimately and commercial activity is less meaningful than other activities. I don’t believe you shown it to be the case that commerce means less than other forms of human interaction. Indeed this is probably a subjective judgement.
In short the harm is not as decisive as it seems and the distinction the position is predicted on isn’t as sharp as they seem.
But for the 20th or so time I do support anti discrimination law. I think you can generate them by both no one wishes to be discriminated against by class so everyone has to lay down that weapon. I also think you can justify the curtailing of liberty by reference to societal stability. It’s not good to induce economic arm races in society.
Sigh. We get to the same place in the end.
@saad
Christians believe sodomy us harmful and they define gayness has “engages in sodomy.”
I’m also not convinced that misogynistic assholes have much choice in the matter. You really don’t choice your beliefs. But that’s probably another discussion.
Yes I’m aware my arguments carry over to race. I accept that I have to tolerate bigoted behavior towards people based on ethnicity and race.
@Caine
I’m fully aware that being a incorporated business is a deciding factor in my interlocutors’ eyes. That being a commercial enterprise opens up restrictions (or conditions) to the person. I’m not buying that distinction between a business and a church should matter. Yes you think being a business for the public means it must serve the entire public but I don’t see any argument that allows for that that can’t also apply to churches or individuals.
I don’t *get* what’s unique about commercial contexts.
@150, Mike Smith
I’d guess it’s been made somewhat special, artificially. If you and your friends were the only people, money might be a kind of meaningless thing. But we’ve artificially made a way to work beyond close ties, personal trust, approval, and so on. Probably because all of those personal things can produce social inefficiencies (at least perceived, according to some metric).
It’s legitimate to question this system, I suppose. I myself have, for reasons similar to “I don’t want to associate with assholes”. But it’s also possible that conflict is minimized in a market where more people can participate, without as much personal complication. Centrism, and all that.
@Mike:
How about this:
Corporations are entirely creations of the state. They exist or not at the whim of the state, and without a government they could not exist at all. They exist at the REQUEST of an individual party (which might itself be another corporation) but they exist because and by the power of the state.
Is a parent responsible for the actions of sub-adult progeny?
Okay, if yes, then the parents must have a certain amount of power over that/those progeny because one cannot be responsible for actions, persons, or things over which one has no control.
If I plant a tree on my property, am I responsible when the tree tips over and crashes onto another neighbor’s house? But I didn’t cause the wind to blow, so what’s the big deal?
If I am still responsible, then I must have a certain amount of power over the tree, right?
A nation creates corporations. It does so because it wants certain economic benefits for its residents as a whole. In taking that action (as desirable as it may be), the nation is responsible for the impact of corporation creation. In order to be responsible, it must have a certain amount of power over those corporations.
The nation takes action in creating corporations. The nation takes responsibility for its action by regulating those corporations to make sure (as best it can) that the act it chose to undertake is (as much as measurably possible) a undeniable good for its residents.
What’s unique about the government’s ability to control corporations is that the government creates the corporations. It doesn’t create the individuals.
Mike, which part of “this discussion is over”* has too many syllables for you to understand?
*before you’re crying “free speech”, the part between me and you.
Also, but separately, I still don’t understand how you can be any more upset by large corporations providing vital services who choose to discriminate and one small cake-baker in a cake-saturated market choosing to discriminate.
I hear that you’ve said you support anti-discrimination law. I’m not trying to reverse your position. What I’m trying to understand is how a vital monopoly could possibly be any different from minority provider in a luxury market if rights and freedoms operate as a unity. I am not asserting you’re an autocrat, but if you believe that liberty is a unity, how can you distinguish between Trudeau and Pinochet? While your idea that one can restrict freedoms as long as one inflicts the restriction equally on all is a somewhat-helpful limiting principle, I still don’t understand what reasoning your doing that would allow you to make a Pinochet/Trudeau (i.e. autocracy vs. just government) distinction that might still be consistent with your expressed idea that liberty is a unity. If liberty is a unity, am I not entirely without rights and freedoms the moment a single right or freedom is restricted in any way?
In what possible way is “liberty as unity” helpful as a concept? And how is it consistent with the argument you’re making that it’s acceptable for governments to restrict liberties?
@154, Crip
I wonder if you ask this in knowledge or ignorance of the sad fact that there are indeed noobs who lump Trudeau in with “absolutists”.
Technical ignorance, though I’m really not surprised. Thanks for the link.
Dang it, I don’t know how that happened – I really didn’t hit submit. I was trying to say “thanks for the link, but it’s not currently working” (it just links back to this page). This wasn’t snarky, btw. I always appreciate sources and anyone can get a link wrong – I’ve done it loads of times.
@gil
You are not my only interlocutor. My last post had a single paragraph addressed to you about a sub issue #27. I then proceeded to reference the general we and expicitly reference Crip.
In short, my large post was 97% for everyone. It was designed to reorient the entire discussion especially to make sure I was rendering Crip’s position fairly.
It’s immaterial to me if you read it or not (and I suspect you didn’t). It’s also immaterial to me if you wish to end our segment of the discussion. I’ve ignored Nerd because my lack of patience trying to explain why their points are usually irrelevant.
You are not Professor Myers or a (to my knowledge) moderator empowered to speak on his behalf. It’s in your purview to end the discussion between us. You have no such power to end the discussion between Crip and myself. My post was *also* for Crip and several others not just you.
If Professor Myers told me to STFU or you *are* moderator telling me the same than fine.
But to knowledge you simply ended the discussion for us while my last post was for myself and others.
@Crip
Give me a few hours and I’ll have a longer response but to preview I’m going end up basically saying that liberty does indeed depend on the silence of the law, and obivous that means *any* law restricts it.
Ah yes. When you tell a man you no longer want to talk to him and he just keeps doing it “because there’s no law against it”. Makes for a well-rounded asshole.
Sigh… I know I probably shouldn’t bother, but here goes…
What’s unique is that you live in a society in which a great many essential goods and services are provided solely by commercial entities. This means that if you allow discrimination by commercial entities, you end up enabling those entities to effectively lock certain minorities out of civil society. See, for example, the history of redlining, or the creation of sundown towns. Do you want to create a situation in which gay people who wish to travel or do business need some updated equivalent of the The Negro Motorist Green Book to advise them as to which businesses are prepared to deal with them, and which areas to avoid entirely?
“But it’s only a cake!”, I hear you cry. Well, fair enough, it’s only a cake, and it’s not the end of the world if you can’t buy a cake (although I don’t feel it’s up to me to tell people which services they should care about being arbitrarily excluded from purchasing). However, I don’t see any sensible way of being able to distinguish in law between “trivial” goods and services, and those goods and services which are essential for effective participation in society. I mean, you won’t die if nobody will sell you broadband or cellphone service, or you get charged 2% extra on a home loan than a straight white person would, right?
It’s not like we don’t have a great deal of fairly recent historical evidence of where allowing this sort of discrimination ends up – segregation.
Dang, this was supposed to be my link.
@Mike:
I realize this conversation has gone on for a long time, and no hard feelings if you don’t, at this point, have even more time to spend on it.
But I wanted to throw in that, yes, I agree that
We’re not disagreeing there. Where we disagree – it seems to me – is that you have asserted that liberty is a “unity” meaning that if it is diminished to any small degree, it is entirely obliterated, with nothing left. All-or-nothing, that’s what your phrase communicates to me (and I’ve really been struggling to come up with another interpretation and can’t find a reasonable one).
Each law reduces freedom by some degree. In my view it doesn’t eradicate it.
So do you believe that freedom is a unity? And if so, how can you justify any laws at all, since anti-discrimination laws are exactly as tyrannical as Judge Dredd-style laws that make one person law enforcement officer, judge, jury, and executioner?
That’s the position that I’ve argued against. When I wrote my longer post saying that those insisting that there is no room for freedom of conscience, I never said that there was infinite room. I’m arguing against the “zero room” position, which too many people seem to think is reasonable. The religious right is constantly braying that religious freedom is “dead”, not compromised in some small way by the needs of living in a diverse community, but “dead”.
How is the “liberty is a unity” position any different from the hysterical position of the religious right? And if it is, have you considered the consequences of using that language when you know (or should know) that the religious right would consider that validating of their all-or-nothing position?
In any case, I appreciate a good-faith effort at discussion.
thanks for the fixed link, BP.