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Out of interest, what's the amendment?

I haven't been keeping up with the news much, but the only thing I recall hearing the phrasing in that headline for is a legal attempt by some people here to protect business owners that refuse to serve gay/LGBTQ...customers. (As I understand it, the argument that's used in favor of that is that since they're Christian, requiring them to serve these customers would be infringing on their freedom to practice their religion).

Ah, I thought it might've been something along those lines. Le sigh.

And indeed their freedom more generally. Normally people have a right to decide their own actions - they can, for example, choose who they want to spend time with, do business with, etc. So, for example, if you're doing really well in a casino, they can ask you to leave, without having to 'prove' that you're 'cheating' in any way (except where there are laws specifically preventing this, as in a couple of states iirc). If I don't like you, I don't have to interract with you. Except if you're gay (or black), in which case I'm obligated to serve you (unless I can prove there's some other objective reason not to). That's inevitably going to get people's backs up, since it takes away the fundamental right to freedom of association (which must include freedom to choose <i>not</i> to associate, to be meaningful). It's a much bigger government intrusion than applies in, say, the issue of state employees having to serve everybody - people choose to be a state employee. More generally it's seen as being part of a broader attack against freedom of speech, in which a supposed right of gay people never to feel offended or unwelcome is used to prevent people from expressing any moral dissent against homosexuality. For people for whom that's a religious precept, this is absolutely an attack on religious liberty. The fact that it's a religion that most people find kind of stupid and archaic doesn't alter that. And at least in this country there has been very little actual discussion of what infringements of liberty are fair and proportionate in order to protect gay people, so people feel that the views of religious minorities are simply being ignored. Over here, it's only a small minority that are religious, so it's not a big political issue - we could round all the christians up into camps and nobody would care much. But in parts of America there's a particular problem because a local majority is being dictated to by a national majority, which never goes down well, and adds a paternalist/imperialist element to the situation.

It's particularly inevitable that passions will be raised in the case of artisans like bakers. We've come to think of acts of creation as personal and expressive: the artist puts in their soul as well as their time. So there's a particular loss of liberty when artists are compelled by the state to create artworks that they personally hate making. It's not just a matter of having to stoically conduct a commercial exchange with a gay person without giving any advice on avoiding hell, which could certainly be argued to be a very minor imposition upon religious freedom; in the case of, say, a wedding cake with an edible figurine of two men kissing, the artisan has to actually devote their time and attention to making that little artwork, for public consumption, publically known as being by them, depicting something they personally find disgusting, effectively promoting the normalcy and healthiness of something they find fundamentally evil and contrary to their religious faith... and they have no choice in the matter, unless they're willing to abandon their whole career. That's a horrible position to put someone in, and it's a unique position too, as it's only messages about sexuality that people can be compelled to create. You can't force someone to make you a "happy holocaust day" greetings card, or even a "congratulations on passing a bathroom bill" flower arrangement, but you <i>can</i> force them to make you a gay wedding cake. In fact, it's more specific than that: it effectively only targets religious faith. Because you can refuse to make the cake because you don't like that flavour, or because you don't like using that much black ink, or because you have a headache, or don't like the guy's haircut - <i>if</i> you can persuade a court that that's your real reason. It's specifically the motivation "I don't want to do that because it's anti-christian" that's prohibited and punished... an unusual case in which it's certain thoughts themselves that have been criminalised, rather than objective actions.
[others might say that actually the target isn't religious objection per se, but bigotry. But opponants of these laws would naturally say - and probably do believe - that there is no bigotry but only a religious objection, or at least that bigots are greatly outnumbers by religious dissenters; this may seem implausible, but there's no way to prove it false]

[A relative of mine when I was growing up actually was a baker. And while she'd have had no problem with making a gay wedding cake, there would certainly have been lines she wouldn't have crossed, and would have been horrified and upset by the idea that the government could simply compell her to make cakes for anybody, with any message they wanted on them, no matter how offensive or upsetting she found the content. Even in cases of things that were perfectly legal and moral. She probably wouldn't have wanted to make any graphic sex scenes, for instance, even if what was depicted was perfectly legal and moral, and even if it was only going to be displayed in an appropriate, consenting adult context. You don't have to think there's anything immoral per se about, say, a sadomasochistic sex scene, to not want to be compelled to have to spend an hour sculpting one: distaste is excuse enough. But in the case of gay scenes, not only is distaste not enough, but deep-seated and fundamental religious dissent is not enough. (although of course the S&M example is a little perverse, in that in the UK it's probably now illegal to <i>consent</i> to make a cake like that, since all depictions of 'extreme' practices are now illegal, unless solely for viewing by the participants themselves...; which might contribute to the sense that many have that the laws forcing public acceptance of this, and prohibiting public acceptance of that, have less to do with anyone's liberty, religious or sexual, and more to do with the state's obsessive need to to control the contours of public morality in the sexual area...)]

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I will take this for hyperbole. WHile some people see their objection as being religious-based, the general idea that people can refuse to serve gay people because they're Christian is busted by the pro-gay rights regular church goers that I know.

And, in America, Christians are clearly still the majority, even if regular church-goers are no longer the majority.

I expect also that someone who "probably wouldn't have wanted to make any graphic sex scenes", wouldn't have wanted to do straight sex scenes either. And such scenes might well be discouraged by just about anyone on the basis that they are graphic sex scenes.

Sal, no one ever complains that they can't kick people out of their place of business because they are black, or women. Why is this different?

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ConlangDictionary 0.3 3/15/14 (ZBB thread)

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I think there is a very important difference between asking businessmen to provide personalized services catering to customers with different tastes and asking businessmen to provide exactly the same service to customers with different tastes when the tastes in question do not affect the service being provided. I could hear out someone who said they don't want to provide cakes with certain decorations, but in the past, Americans have been denied service for belonging to groups that businessmen did not approve of when membership in that group did not affect the service being provided. That seems unwarranted and dangerous to me, as it could lead to segregation if allowed to progress unchecked.

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That's a good point.

One thing I can't understand is why the people who ordered such cake would choose to do so at an establishment which disapproved of that sort of thing. Even if they didn't know to begin with and they only found out when the business made it clear to them their position, they should have taken their custom somewhere else. The business is wrong to use their faith to justify their bigotry ("love your neighbour as yourself" should be their real focus), but forcing them to make a cake depicting a gay couple is not going to change their opinions on that subject.

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It's all very well to say "vote with your wallet" or whatever the buzzword is. but it could be that that bakery is the only convenient one, or the only one that makes certain types of cakes, or the only one you like... and realistically, if you adopt that policy, enough bakeries will have discriminatory practices that some people just can't get cakes anywhere. If every bakery refused to make cakes for gay people, would you still consider it a valid choice on the part of each individual bakery, or would you have some contingency for that situation? When does that contingency apply? Etc. Laws exist to avoid tragedy of the commons situations, not enable them.

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ConlangDictionary 0.3 3/15/14 (ZBB thread)

Quis vult in terra stare,
Cum possit volitare?

Any bakery refusing to sell cakes which they would sell to non-gay people to gay people is a huge problem and the business should be shut down if necessary. So gay people can still buy some other cake from any bakery, or a generic cake and have someone else do the decoration or do it themselves, etc, hoping more gay-friendly bakeries would open business near them in the future.

However, if bakeries refuse to make certain decorations requested by gay people and gay people only, then I personally would not do business with that bakery, but should the government force them to sell specific services that they don't want to sell? I don't know if I'm comfortable with governments becoming guardians of our values to that extent. Seems a bit hypocritical when that's what I accuse right-wing governments of doing.

That's what I'm on the fence about.

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If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way. - Mark Twain

In reality, our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift. - Socrates

No one's saying the government should force anyone to sell specific services. I'm not sure why you think we should jump straight to shut the business down for a first infraction of something that's so easily fixable, either. If it was a safety issue that couldn't be fixed in a timely manner, then sure, shut it down while they fix it, but this is just a simple matter of not being an asshole. There's plenty of ways to make business owners hurt for being discriminatory asshats than just blindly shutting down their business and making them into a martyr.

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ConlangDictionary 0.3 3/15/14 (ZBB thread)

Quis vult in terra stare,
Cum possit volitare?

That is the precise scenario that Sal brought up as an objection.


There is a difference between absolute necessity and the first hint of trouble.

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If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way. - Mark Twain

In reality, our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift. - Socrates

This is what Sal said:



His complaint is not about specific services, or even about services at all, it's some hogwash about how this supposedly interferes with right to free association, as if any of us have that freedom in our professional lives.



So, you keep crippling the business everytime they fuck up until it can no longer operate, or revoke a license or something.

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ConlangDictionary 0.3 3/15/14 (ZBB thread)

Quis vult in terra stare,
Cum possit volitare?

Ah, the power of framing. Those poor bakers, forced to create sculptures of graphic gay sex by an unfeeling government!

Here is where that technique from the Hitchhiker's Guide TV show should be used: a big flashing warning should appear on your screen saying THIS NEVER HAPPENS.

Let's frame it the other way, by looking at actual history. A couple generations ago, it was accepted practice that all businesses could keep black people out. If you were black, you could not go to a restaurant, you could not stay in a hotel, you could not join a club, you could not get a loan, you could not rent or buy a house, you could not go to a public school, you could not go to college, you could not go to a church, unless those institutions were in black neighborhoods. This was not a policy of one or two obscure, cranky yet otherwise lovable shop owners. This was everyone. It was literally possible to go to a city and not find a place to spend the night.

How far can the majority go to harass and obstruct a hated minority? Is Sal OK with every hotel in town having a policy that excludes blacks? Please don't say "Oh, the market will provide a black-friendly hotel." It didn't. Please don't say "They can go to a black-owned hotel." Blacks could be denied the right to run a hotel even if they had the money to do so; this happened even in the North.

Is the case of gays different because of religion? People in those times thought that religion barred "miscegenation".

People have a right to whatever hatreds they care to harbor; they don't have a right to create a universal hostile environment for groups they dislike.

In a big city, discrimination against gays/lesbians is not going to be a huge issue. In a small town, it makes a big difference if there are only three bakeries, and three of them choose to discriminate. The "right to association" comes down to believing that it's OK if gays and lesbians are treated as invisible pariahs in small towns.

Finally, if appeals to morality don't work, perhaps I could invoke a sense of the ridiculous? Are shopowners really entitled to query their customers about what they do in bed? If a baker is asked to make a wedding cake for "Sam & Chris", is their precious freedom violated if they do not know if Chris is male or not? OK, the name on the order is Christopher, so their precious religious freedom kicks in and they refuse Sam & Chris's business. Poor luck for his fiancée Samantha.

Edit: to try to make it clearer: it's highly misleading to paint these situations as the majority trying to oppress minority Christians. It's a Christian majority trying to oppress sexual minorities. The whole reason the issue is visible is because state legislatures are able to easily pass pro-discrimination laws. (In one case, the state did so in order to overturn a city's anti-discrimination law.) When the majority are in favor of discrimination, taking their side means affirming that the minority has no right to services at all.

I don't think you read Sal's post. I was addressing his complaint about, "It's particularly inevitable that passions will be raised in the case of artisans like bakers"... and the personal loss of liberty of artisans who are forced to create decorations that offend their artistic sensibilities. This is forcing businesses to provide specific services.


I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm saying I'd rather see a business closed than have it continue to operate while serving only non-gay people because segregation, etc.

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If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way. - Mark Twain

In reality, our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift. - Socrates

This is a strawman, because there is no such effort to do anything of the sort. It is not worth addressing.



You made it sound like the government was going to come in an forcibly close the business.

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Quis vult in terra stare,
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I don't think you understand what strawman means and I doubt my ability to teach you.


Like I said, I don't think you understand what strawman means and I doubt my ability to teach you.

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If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way. - Mark Twain

In reality, our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, which indeed is a divine gift. - Socrates

If I said that was an argument against something that doesn't happen put forward as an argument against something real, would that clear it up for you?

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Quis vult in terra stare,
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I'm sorry, as someone who live in the UK, where (in most places) being gay is a non-issue and such incidences are unusual occurences, I clearly have failed to grasp the reality of the US situation. For me I would think nothing of going along to another town if my local bakery objected to something I had ordered. I realise that this is nit necessaruly the case in the United States and I therefore apologise for any confusion I may have caused by my previous comments.

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From what I gather, towns are much closer together over there. Where I grew up, it wouldn't be reasonable to go to a different town for something like a cake, although that's different now that I'm in New England (or at least, this part of New England), and obviously it'd be different in a big city, like Zompist said. But really, the point is that even if it isn't the case now that e.g. gay people are systematically shut out of bakeries, history has shown that that's what happens if you don't have laws like that.

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ConlangDictionary 0.3 3/15/14 (ZBB thread)

Quis vult in terra stare,
Cum possit volitare?

they do, for a decade or two, and then they get used to it as increasingly the fewer and fewer folks who do get looked at with more and more suspicion. This will be the same, I expect.


except privately owned bakeries are quite categorically *not* commons. they're whatever not-the-commons is [the privates?]. I mean this is why rightwingers find leftwingers distastefully entitled and collectivist: "bakers" are a bunch of people, they're not in any way a commonly held public good. I think rottingbones here is kind of on the money: there's a difference between selling retail versus going into a business partnership with someone, and I don't have like a very well thought out system for this, but I have this feeling that an apple salesman that's selling apples on the street refusing to sell some of his apples to a particular person on account of some bullshit religious thing is one thing and then that same person deciding to decline the offer of that same fellow to say put together both of their savings and open a bigger apple store next block on account of those same bullshit religious reasons. The latter seems to me much more permissible. I mean it's still stupid and bigoted and irrational, because it's on account of bullshit religious reasons, but stupid as the beliefs of some religions seem to us, these people actually hold these views.

And like forcing a religious bigot to make a decoration that reads "happy wedding mark and adam"...I don't know. Policing people's morality doesn't seem to me to be the most tasteful role of the state. It's sad that some bigot would do that, don't get me wrong, but at some point a liberal government can't be forcing bigots to never be bigots: the goal is to have no bigots, of course, but that's only ever going to be achieved through the moral progress of civilization via the recession of irrational superstition from actually playing a role in people's lives to token belief and weddings-and-funerals religiosity [by far the best kind of religiosity if you ask me], popularization of the right ideas, technological progress and the old recalcitrants dying off, leaving their slightly ashamed descendents behind to comment on how parochially racist or heteronormative grampa was: it's certainly not going to happen by strongly forcing the bigots to act as if they were not bigots, that only breeds resentment and feeds organized resistence.


ffs this progressive mantra is annoying. No, ethics is not a simple matter of "don't be an asshole". "don't be an asshole" is just an empty platitude. Obviously the bigots think *you're* being the asshole for forcing them to act against their sincerely held religious beliefs, utterly stupid as they are, and that the homosexuals are the assholes for going against the morality given us by the almighty creator of the universe who's always right because who the hell knows why people believe this nonsense. Of course in reality they're being the assholes cause they're wrong, but they don't know that. Pretending that such things are "simply a matter of don't be an asshole" is like when christians say that atheists are in fact not atheist and that they have just as much belief in god as they do but they pretend not to in order to sin. It's mind-bogglingly shortsighted and a grievous failure to imagine that others might, in fact, not be the same as you.


"oppress" in these situations is a religious term, or at least a propaganda term, and it's not very helpful or clarifying other than as an emotional argument to command people's agreement with your point: Obviously the bigots are being bigots and doing an injustice upon the homosexuals, trans folks, and so on and so on if they refuse to serve them. Just as obviously, the suggestion of the state using force against the bigots to force them to conform to the hegemonic morality of non-discrimination is a violent act and, as Salmoneus eloquently put it, constitutes a national majority imposing their views upon a local majority which is itself a national minority. Unjust and bigoted and wrong as they may be, the bigots here are not being violent, and we *would* be engaging in moral policing and we *would* be using violence to prevent the bigots from expressing their sincerely held religious beliefs in a nonviolent fashion (I mean, we leftists and social science types have long done this thing of calling even the slightest deviation from what we deem to be the correct way to behave "violent" or, in your anglosaxon world "microaggressions" but the reality is that refusing to sell you a cake is not violent in the way saying "you can't sell apples and if you try i'll take the apples from you and put you in jail" is). and reducing this complicated situation of irreconcilable differences between human beigns to this one-dimensional and five-year-old-level-of-complexity model of " who is oppressing whom" and pretending that makes the situation trivially easy is at best propaganda and at worst self delusion.

I mean, I'm not even against punishing the bigots for their bigotry, to a moderate and sensible degree anyway, I reckon that to some degree states should enforce anti-discrimination laws, but what I *am* against is this self delusion that the issue is not one where what we are endorsing is violent opposition to a nonviolent injustice, that we are the hegemonic force here struggling against remanents of the ancien regime, and that we are the moral police imposing by force compliance with our system of beliefs regardless of what the bigot's system of beliefs are: we are the ones saying you're going to accept our morality and not act in accordance to yours or else. that's... sobering, and hegemonic groups engaging in moral policing need all the sobriety they can get.

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Did you even read the description of race discrimination from my post? Look, for one hundred years people tried "popularization of the right ideas" as the way to get bigots to not be bigots. It didn't work. There is no reason to believe that another hundred years would have worked.

I don't know why people always come up with some variation of "What if you just asked really nicely?" as if this strategy had never occurred to anyone. Asking really nicely is the first strategy that people try, every single time. What do you do when it fails?

And really, don't complain about the use of the word "oppression" and then fill your post with rhetorical invocations of "force" and "violence". If you want to talk about actual violence, it's all on the other side: it's the bigots who kill gays and lesbians and trans people, not the other way around.

There are a bunch of regulations that governments place on business. Bakers can't put rat poison in their cakes; they have to keep the place clean; they have to keep it reasonably safe; they have to pay property taxes; they have to pay their employees. If you want to call that "hegemonic force", I think you're playing games with words. Regulating commerce is part of the rule of law, and every human society has found it necessary. Or is it only "untasteful hegemonic force" when we ask businesses to serve black people?


Again, I think people should pay attention to the framing. In this imagined situation-- a baker refusing service to a customer-- think about why you immediately sympathize with the baker, not with the customer. Why is it easier to understand the motivations of a bigoted baker than to feel what it would be like to want to get married and find businesses all closed down in your face? And how is it the "sincere, oppressed baker" frame always ignores the majority of legislators in the state siding with him? Maybe you've just never contemplated society, business, and the law all conspiring to make your life crappier. Good for you, but maybe you should be aware that not everyone is that lucky.

Right. It's the same thing. The only reason Sal thinks it's different is that there are more of this particular type of bigot around right now.



I was being more general here: it's a situation where individuals acting on their own rationales create a dysfunctional system. I don't mean that bakeries are literally a collective resource, even though I don't think the public and private sectors are really as distinct as you seem to think they are.



You know there are plenty of religious Christians who would happily see Mark and Adam get married, and even marry them in their churches, right? Religion isn't the problem here.



I don't see what this has to do with anything anyone has said. No one is talking about people going into business with each other.



Make up your mind, man. Does it make philosophical sense to call people assholes, or not?



Assuming all people have a shared aspect of humanity in them is that bad? You really believe that all religious people are evil unredeemable monsters? I don't think you're being the empathetic person you're pretending to be.

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ConlangDictionary 0.3 3/15/14 (ZBB thread)

Quis vult in terra stare,
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One difference is that one can be a gay in the closet in a way that you can't be black or female in the closet. Heck, until such times that certain acts are shown or spoken of, one is by definition in the closet for gayness. Whether or how that makes a difference is another matter.

Not taking any sides here, just stating my understanding of the situation:
The only way to get artisans who are against homosexuality to serve is to force them by legislation or create a market pressure. However, you can't create an effective boycott against a bakery in Smallvillage, Socialconservativania, where enough customers will support the baker(s)'s decision that they will not go out of business.

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