Yes.

??

the aggrieved party contacted the state civil rights commission, which then made an inquiry and referred the issue to its enforcement division (I might have "commission" and "division" technically swapped)

the baker lost and appealed



It is interesting, though, and it is covered in the decision, that while the issue was pending, someone else went around to local bakeries and tried to get them to write really offensive things on cakes just to report them to the civil rights department; the department's denial of those claims was included in the baker's arguments.

Isn't this exactly your guys' take - write fines if a company refuses to serve minorities?

Once again, there is nothing you can do as anyone to guarantee the baker makes them a cake.

This is the fundamental issue with liberalism, IANAW. You can’t sit here and explain how good the idea of “freedom of speech” is to me until you are blue in the face and I won’t disagree. Just like I think the idea of heaven is also a good idea. But that is all they will even be—ideas.

It doesn’t matter a lick that some old dudes wrote “freedom of speech” on a piece of paper 250 years ago. Empire will still do what it wants because that piece of paper is not magical.

Who is “your guys”? Who in this thread do you see me agreeing with?

Lol that you think MY view is that all we need to do is to fine companies to fix social problems.

the ultimate remedy afaict is injunction, the violation of which may include incarceration

maybe it creates a private right of action?

Don't you mean balconyline?

I just don't understand who in their right mind would want this cake from the company that has received the injunction instead of taking their business to a competitor. You could eliminate many steps from this process and end up with the same result. (provided there are competitors in the area yadayada).

Birdman, on this narrow point I think len is right here -- by what other means would you choose to enforce these laws?

(Of course, what we should be doing is both providing restitution to the actual aggrieved party and slapping a hefty fine on top of that for wasting society's time in making the baker not be an ass -- and, obviously, we don't do that now. If that's your only argument, then, fine I guess?)

Pretty sure it goes beyond fines. People who discriminate openly in their business should not be permitted to operate said business.

You can't ensure that the baker bake a cake, but you can ensure he doesn't bake a cake for anybody else for profit.

This way (just ignoring them and moving on) does seem to give the discriminating baker a freeroll, doesn't it?

Some people believe they have the right to be treated with dignity and are willing to fight for it.

But the client engages in a negative freeroll where the best case scenario is what they originally wanted and the worse scenario is a hastily made crapcake.

I don't trust that you can get properly legislated everything that comes after the binary yes/no to the cake.

If we are talking about strictly how to handle this situation in a liberal society, if someone discriminates against a protected party by refusing them service then the business should not be allowed to exist.

As I said I earlier, go home and bake or don’t bake cakes for whomever you want. But if you want to start a business making cakes then you have to operate by societies rules.

One fun aspect of the cake case is that gay marriage was still illegal in Colorado when this case originated. So it would be hard to argue that he wasn't doing as you suggest.

No, they get the added bonus that the baker is punished such that they don't then do this same thing to fifty other people. While that's not necessarily a personal benefit to the person doing the suing, that's clearly a societal benefit (and in fact enforcing these types of societal benefits requires sacrifice on the part of the person aggrieved, which sucks, but it is what it is -- one more reason to over-enforce rather than under-enforce in these situations).

Rosa Parks wasn't just in court to assert her own personal right to sit at the front of the bus, if you'll permit the analogy.

(Edit to add: on a personal level, they also get the benefit of fifty other potentially discriminatory parties seeing that such behavior will lead to them in turn being dragged into court and spending much of THEIR time and money on it, and making a similar calculation to the one you suggest that just baking the damn cake is a lot easier than bankrupting themselves on lawyers defending their right to not do so.)

The funny thing is that if Rosa Parks were alive today, she could get rejected by her Uber driver while being picked up and the driver is not obliged to give any reason. At least that's how I've understood it.

But I get what you're saying how ****ing with the company can be an exciting thing as well. I still don't get how this is all so obvious for all of you as there are pros and cons to both methods and you restrict a ****ton of freedoms, some of which come from the account of the very people you are trying to protect.

It isn't hard to imagine a situation analogous to the Colorado one occurring in the future involving robots.

I don't see why society should get to impose it's will on individuals.

Obviously the baker is genuine in his beliefs and he is not ad hoc discriminating against gays. We know this because he won't bake Halloween cakes. So he is discriminating more against what he sees as unchristian practices--although he will make cakes for non-Christian.

Is this important at all or should it change things and even if his religion is antiquated does the government really have a right to tell him so?

OMFG the Halloween cakes is completely irrelevant.

But you can't really ensure that, right?

Lol Dustin you have gone totally off the rails

.

I mean the robot thing was clearly worse than the Halloween thing

The phrase "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins" applies here.

Which is what makes this case tough.

But you guys will just say in 2045 or whenever robot weddings are legalized, that those bakers should be shut down then too (you might want to now even). Basically bakers don't get to have a conscience.