I can't get on board with this. Businesses, while privately owned, mostly can not be thought of as entirely "private" in the usual sense. That is by opening a business you engage in conducting with consumers. And those consumers have rights.

Essentially this kind of law is a neologism for "No blacks, No Irish" signs.

The sincerity of belief does not afford it special treatment. If you open a cake store you choose to do business with the public. No matter how genuine or how strong your belief that the Irish are an immoral folk, you don't get to create a discriminatory society.

Monetary penalties, usually in the way of law suits, are the way we penalise business for this.

Quoting bladesman but this post is more general: I think it does. At its root we are talking about a conflict between two values everyone in this thread probably ascribes to. On the one side, we value non discrimination (against gay people in this case). on the other, we value freedom where people are able to act as they choose. The problem is where these things come in conflict: where ones free choices cause some form of discriminatory harm against a particular group.

A lot of the time these conversations end up being talking past each other, because both sides chooses one of these two values as the sort of trump and speaks of its importance. "Discrimination is bad! But freedom is good!". So it is somewhat more subtle argument to find the best balances at these intersection points.

Anyways, back to why I am objecting to your statement. The issue I think is that preventing people's free actions on things they deeply care about is a more egregious harm than preventing people's free actions on things they find to be trivial (all else being equal if that is somehow possible). For instance, in society religious beliefs are given a distinct status with distinct special protections and outside of historical reasons a part of this is because of the importance that people place on their religious beliefs.

People gave lemonzest examples like what about discrimination for divorced people or liars or whatever. This is fine, its a useful exercise. But rightly or wrongly - and I think for the most part wrongly - people DO care more about the gay issue than other issues. Its asymmetric but sincerely so, if that makes sense.

For me the bigoted wedding cake maker does experience a genuine harm by being forced to make the cake out of fear or legal reprisals. They will be upset and angered by it and that infringing on their freedom is a legitimate harm. It is just that the harm that discrimination in society gives on gay people is significantly larger. So in my utilitarian view, it is worth legislating against bigoted cake makers or whatever because it is going for the smaller of two harms in a situation that is by its very nature a contrast between two different (each laudible) values that we have to pick which dominates in this specific situation.

Yes

Then it seems like the problem is that you evaluate both cases different sides, depending on which POV is closer to your own. I.e. you sympathise with the discriminator when you imagine them as a straight Christian like yourself, and sympathise with the discriminated against when you imagine them to be, again, a straight Christian like yourself.

If it's not too personal: has anyone close to you divorced and re-married?

My point is not that evangelicals should build bridges with the gay community. It's that if you are going to discriminate against sinners then discriminate against all sinners. Not just those who commit sins that your congregation don't commit.

No. I'm not defending/justifying every invocation of "religious freedoms." I'm laying out general principles for how I understand these things.

I haven't read any links either.

I hold the right for ministers of a particular religion to not be forced to officiate weddings that go against their religious beliefs and for church properties to have the right to not have their grounds used for marriages that they do not sanction. These are two that (to me) fall into the "religious freedoms" where people can choose who they offer services to, or not offer services to. But I would also be okay if a particular church or religious organization had set a rule that they won't do interracial marriages or "Irish only" marriages.

Be careful with "public service" and "public accommodation" as these are two very different things. I'm not sure what argument was being used in the actual eHarmony lawsuit, but I'm pretty sure it would come down to some form of "public accommodation" even though it was a private company.

The reason I wanted to weigh in on this thread is because it seemed like the Christian view was not even being considered. The general sentiment expressed was something like " oh those ridiculous bigoted Christians". While some Christians are in fact petty and bigoted there are many who mean well. MB asked about sincerity upthread I and I think sincerity is the key factor. At the same time I acknowledge people can be sincerely wrong.

UM did a good job of at least acknowledging there was harm being done to people (potentially) being forced to act against their conscience. Obv. I am not attempting to affect policy. I am saying is it is worth considering the other point of view.

I guess I am pretty egocentric (seriously could be the case)

My wife

I am not postulating we should be able to discriminate against sinners. I can see why you would see it that way though. The issue around marriage is that by participating in some way you are actually a party to that activity. Of course there are degrees of culpability.

I don't have like a clear answer here. I believe that the gay couple would still need to have their roof fixed and have their pipes repaired and that sorta thing. I don't think discrimination in those cases is necessary or serves any purpose.

Yes I know. I am just saying even among Christians there could be disagreement in regards to what is "right".

OK, but that doesn't address the point I'm making here. I want you to explain why you are comfortable with discrimination based on one particular marriage-based sin but uncomfortable with discrimination based on a different marriage-based sin.

Perhaps spend a couple of minutes imagining your wife and you picking out a cake for your wedding and being told that your the bakery participating in your wedding in this small way would be morally unacceptable. How would you and your wife have felt? Would you have been comforted to know that the bakery was just following their moral responsibilities as Christians?

LZ, I'm confused.

Ok, let's say we consider the "Christian POV" (while recognizing that the bill itself probably says nothing about Christianity itself since all religions are supposed to be considered equal in this country). What could come of it except for deciding that this bill is alright and discrimination should be allowed? But you say:

So then there's nothing to consider. Those that want to discriminate are wrong and should be shamed.

Disclaimer up front: I probably agree with you that eHarmony should not have been forced to do this. However, I don't think it was such a big expense to eHarmony. I have a BS in Computer Science, but I've never worked in that industry, so maybe I have just enough knowledge on this subject matter to steer me wrong, but I can't see how it would take more than 1 hour to alter eHarmony to support all gender-pairing combinations. It wouldn't even require a separate webpage -- just one more question for each user and two tweaks to the algorithm determining what people you're matched with.

I agree that it would probably not be hard to tweak the algorithm make such matches. But it's not like eHarmony would have been able to just make a duplicate of the server with a couple tweaks and just let it run. They were forced to make an investment in it.

I'm not sure what a 6-month subscription fee costs, but at $10/month, that's $600,000 of lost revenue.

I don't get why they had to make a separate site at all. This can all easily be done on one combined site, just like others do. Were they that afraid of exposing their straight customers to the gays?

Them giving away free membership I did not know about.

They anticipated (and there was) a backlash from conservatives. By keeping things separate, they minimized the appearance that they were supportive of the decision. At least this way, they were providing the service without being obvious that they're the gay site was somehow connected with the straight site.

Edit: Also, you might not want the databases to overlap.

Edit 2: To elaborate, depending on how the code was written, it might be simpler to run two separate databases than to insert an extra checking algorithm into the matching code. It could be that they would have to go line by line to check for all instances of a certain call to make sure that it was called correctly to include the extra parameter, or whatever.

Looking back at this now, there's kind of an irony to it because there are dating sites for all sorts of sub-populations (Jewish, Christian, FarmersOnly...), and a lawsuit like this would be looked at as just being frivolous. But because the lawsuit was given status as a class-action lawsuit and the political climate at that time was very different, it was a serious and credible threat to their company to face it in court and to leave a multi-million dollar decision to the hands of a jury of 12 of unknown political viewpoints.

I don't think you can equate a gay dating site with a Farmers only or Christian only etc site

Please elaborate.

It's obvious there is a world of difference between choosing to date someone because they have a similar employment/ religion etc and looking to date someone that you are attracted to on the basis of your sexuality. The first one is a restriction that you are choosing to impose on yourself, the second isn't.

Okay... but that doesn't really say much of anything about the position I took, does it?

Edit: There are dating websites that match people of certain ethnic backgrounds, too.

http://www.indiandating.com/

Very good comparative example. Of course I would be upset. But having said that if I knew they were conservative Christians who honestly thought divorce and remarriage was a sin (many people think this) I hope I would at least cut them some slack on that. They are attempting to live out their convictions the best way they know how. I am assuming our interaction was reasonable and they didn't seem hateful or rude about it.

This is the type of one sided conclusionism (just made it up) I was trying to mitigate.

More directly pointed at the topic, do you think that the bakery should be legally required to bake your cake for you?

In that case I fail to see the releveance of bringing those other sites up. The people who use them could also use the e-harmony site. If they choose to narrow down their preferences further and use a more specific site then that's their choice.

This is such an oddly framed position that I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make.

Here's what I said:

Do you disagree that the availability of a large number of websites which cater to all sorts of sub-populations would make such a lawsuit be seen as frivolous?

Is there a reason for this other than the fact that they are Christians?

How exactly does one "mean well" while excluding service to others?

There is a relatively large distinction between "open to a particular minority only" and "open to everybody except a particular minority". As in, I don't mind an indian only dating website, but I do mind an "everyone but indian" dating website. The issue stems from the fact that there is large historical precedent of minorities facing oppression from majorities and so it is acceptable to build up support networks for said minorities, but excluding the minorities from a majority participation network can cause significant harm. So in our case, we should be much more outraged that a major dating site doesn't include gays (not that this means they it should be illegal, but certainly shame on them) than about a minor gay only dating site.


There is a bit of a legal analogy here with a lot of the debate is over the issue of whether "heightened scrutiny" applies to LGBT or not. As in, is this particular group facing a particular level of societal discrimination (such as women and blacks faced) to justify a very strong standard before one writes laws that affect these people negatively in the pursuit of some state aim or other (like a state aim to promote traditional marriage). The arguments were not spelled out super clearly, but there is some thought that this was de facto at play in Windsor, for instance. So somewhat similarly, we can treat gay people as being a minority was a sufficiently strong societal discrimination to warrant explicit protections in a way that, say, farmers do not.

I don't disagree, but I don't agree, either. I take a much more principled approach that is not simply based on volume.

Taking your position as you've expressed it, you would draw a negative distinction for a "whites only" dating webpage simply because whites constitute the majority (and a privileged one). I think that creates a weird double-standard.

Being one sided isn't bad when one side is clearly right. The downside to a Christian baking a cake for a gay wedding is nothing compared to the downside of legalizing discrimination against gays. This bill would be a huge step backwards and is truly indefensible.

I'm curious, do these other sites actually require that you be part of their subgroup? Like, can a Christian join jdate and find other non-Jews, if any others exist on the site?

Maybe a better example would be gay.com. I guess if someone sued they'd set themselves up to handle straight people, but I doubt it would get any straight traffic with that name.

In what sense do you mean "require"? Anyone can sign up under any pretense they choose. Whether you would find anyone else trying to sign up under a false pretense and find them in a meaningful way is an open question. If you signed up on JDate as a non-Jewish person looking for a non-Jewish person, I really don't know what you would find. I doubt you would be successful, but I might be wrong.

Trying to argue from the name of the website probably isn't going to yield a particularly principled position. You're probably right, but I don't see how it makes an argument about anything.

eHarmony was still a straight-only website until another lawsuit rolled around and forced them to merge the site into one:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_440853.html

Again, this was settled out of court, and not so no legal ruling was actually made. My understanding of the basis of this suit was that bisexuals did not want to pay for two separate services, and that the argument was based on the idea that making them pay for access to both the straight and the gay sites was discriminatory.