Magrat
Mrs. Rincewind
Im sorry but that isnt what I was asking.
Question on Conservative Mindset
- Thread starter Magrat
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Im sorry but that isnt what I was asking.
Magrat
Mrs. Rincewind
That's not what I'm asking, thank you. I'm asking about a specific quote, as cited in the op.
Magrat
Mrs. Rincewind
I can see that, for sure. I am guessing it may be related to the mindset that says, "you can't do that because my religion says so"?
I agree.
I thought this was going to be one of those threads in which lefties pile on their on biases, but then I found this.
This is it. At the core of it, "conservatives" are uncomfortable with change and like progressives they tend to justify their beliefs after the fact with what ever rationale they can find.
As a side, some "rights" of special interested to infringe on the "rights" of others. The whole gay wedding cake thing is an example of that. The "right" of a gay couple to get married doesn't impact the "rights" of straight folks in any meaningful way until you then say that a business will have to bake them a cake in order to stay in business.
Magrat
Mrs. Rincewind
If you look for bias, you shall find it.
Can you explain to me how baking a cake for someone infringes on your rights? Does God dock you a Good Boy Point? It makes legitimately zero sense to me... As an atheist, I would happily take money from a christian couple that was getting married. Baking a cake for which you are paid does not endorse anything or support anything. If anything, refusing to provide services for a large part of the population will just ruin your business.
Please, can you explain how it infringes on your rights to bake a cake? what exactly are you losing by making money from a customer?
I can even kinda see if it required participation in the actual wedding but...baking a cake?? If I am quite honest it just makes the bakery sound dead ass petty.
I think it might be depending on how one views one's status. The zero-sum approach has been mentioned before.
If you think of society as a pecking order, then if one group (gay's for example) are forbidden to marry, then they are below you in the pecking order. If they are then able to marry, they rise in the pecking order and you, as a consequence fall.
If you don't view society as such a pecking order, but as a more collaborative system, then other people doing well might actually reflect well on you.
Just to play devils advocate
What if someone asked for an openly racist cake?
Or a gay cake maker gets asked to make an anti-gay cake?
Does it still fall under
"Baking a cake for which you are paid does not endorse anything or support anything. If anything, refusing to provide services for a large part of the population will just ruin your business.
Please, can you explain how it infringes on your rights to bake a cake? what exactly are you losing by making money from a customer?"
Meadmaker
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If you need to have it explained, it's not likely that anyone could explain it to you. It's so incredibly obvious that if an explanation is required, then that same explanation probably won't be understood.
Some of that has to do with the fact that a lot of people haven't really thought through the whole concept of "rights". It's one of those terms that we use a lot, but which a lot of people haven't thought much about. It gets into the whole question of "legal rights" versus "natural rights", and in the US constitution it gets even trickier because the Constitution defines a sort of two layer system of legal rights, in which some rights can be abridged by the legislature, while others cannot.
And then even that gets messed up, because the Supreme Court gets involved and declares that some practice or other gets declared unconstitutional. The effect is that there is a brand new legal right which people enjoy today, but did not enjoy in years past, except that in order to make it fit in with the legal theory of the constitution, the only way they can create the new right is to insist that the right existed for a long time, but no one had really noticed it until the court ruled in a specific case.
In which case, if you outlaw the practice, you are infringing on their right to be dead ass petty. Feel free to do so, but recognize that you are restricting their legal rights.
Any time you make something illegal that had previously been legal, you are infringing on someone's legal rights. That just a definition. In ages past, a restaurant owner had the right to refuse service to black people. Today, they don't. Those discriminatory restaurant owners have lost a legal right.
Today, some people say that cake bakers should have the right to decline to bake cakes if the message on the cake is offensive to their religious beliefs, and they also note that the cake itself carries a message. Other people say that although the cake baker should be able to decline some sorts of business offensive to his religious beliefs, for example refusing to make Halloween themed cakes, there are other messages that are so important that the cake baker should be compelled to create such cakes as a condition of doing business. Of such fine distinctions are court cases made.
But we are getting away from the OP. The question of whether two people ought to be allowed to enter into a legally defined, state-sanctioned, partnership is separate from the question of who ought to be required to bake a cake to celebrate the occasion, and both of those questions are at best peripheral to the question of what is the conservative mindset that explains how the laws create special rights for gay people. If you are interested in expanding the OP to include the question of the conservative mindset that supports allowing people to continue to operate bakeries, even though they won't bake cakes for gay weddings, that's one that I actually understand. I don't understand why the right to get married is a "special right", and I would call it a stretch to say that the right to buy wedding cake is a "special right", but I do understand why some people would object to closing down bakeries who refuse to make cakes for gay weddings.
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Magrat
Mrs. Rincewind
Those are at least stating a point of view. A plain old ordinary wedding cake does not.
Here's the difference: If you asked me to paint your house, I would say sure. If you asked me to paint "******* go home" on your house, I would not.
If you asked me to bake a cake to be brought to a White supremacist event, yes I would bake it. If you asked me to bake a cake in the shape of a black man being linched, no I would not.
eta I actually wouldn't paint your house. Just an illustration.
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Would you bake a cake with a message celebrating the 50 year anniversery of the founding of a local KKK chapter? Would you bake a cake with a Nazi flag on it with no words? It's a fine line between what is a message and what is not.
The point is that laws or rulings that say that someone cannot refuse service to _____ group for ______ reason by definition limits a business person's right to choose what clients he will do business with and what services he will provide. It doesn't matter what the service is or who the client is.
That said, I have a lot more sympathy with declining to bake Nazi/KKK cakes than gay wedding cakes. But there is a logic to the argument.
Now, to the point in the original post: how does this fit into the case of the transgender girl going into the girl's bathroom? To them, a girls' bathroom is a space exclusive to girls, not just in terms of gender, but in terms of sex. So allowing trans girls with male sexual organs into the girls' room infringes on their daughter's right to a space with only female genitalia present. It's akin to the reasons why brothers and sisters should close the bathroom door when taking a shower or changing clothes. Basically, they see it as infringing on the rights to traditionally segregated bathrooms.
There is some nuance: some people who are against transgender bathroom access are otherwise supportive. Or some people may have no problems with bathrooms, but locker rooms/gym showers are a different issue to them.
In my experience, very few people are conservative on every issue and very few people are liberal on every issue. People are more complex than that.
Magrat
Mrs. Rincewind
TomB but my question was, what is being lost by the person making the cake? I never asked should they be allowed to deny. I want to know how their rights are being infringed.
Example: If my neighbor builds a fence between our properties and it is a foot onto my side, I can say he has infringed upon my property, and point to it.
What exactly is being lost in baking a cake? To my mind youre only losing if you dont bake it.
eta specifically making a wedding cake for a gay couple. I can sorta see if the cake has writing/pictures whatever you object to, but a wedding cake is just a cake. Im assuming for sake of argument it doesnt say HAPPY GAY WEDDING or have two intertwined vaginas or something.
Example: If my neighbor builds a fence between our properties and it is a foot onto my side, I can say he has infringed upon my property, and point to it.
What exactly is being lost in baking a cake? To my mind youre only losing if you dont bake it.
eta specifically making a wedding cake for a gay couple. I can sorta see if the cake has writing/pictures whatever you object to, but a wedding cake is just a cake. Im assuming for sake of argument it doesnt say HAPPY GAY WEDDING or have two intertwined vaginas or something.
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ponderingturtle
Orthogonal Vector
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Or a cake that condones miscegenation! Refusing interracial couples is of course protected speech, also for the wrong religions like jews just like when placing foster kids.
Really all anti-discrimination laws are violently anti conservative.
ponderingturtle
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Exactly removing all those proper racial limits on home sales was the kind of anti conservative measure that no one would really stand for. Those people all purchased those homes on the understanding that non whites would be kept out and then you have the "antidiscrimination" ruling destroying their property value!!!!
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
When you bake a cake, you lose the opportunity to do something else with the time, money, and other resources you spent on baking the cake. Maybe you could have baked a different, more profitable cake. Maybe you could have given the money you spent on ingredients to the homeless person on the street outside your bakery. Maybe you could have gone home and spent the time with your family. The exact opportunity cost of baking a cake will vary from baker to baker, and from cake to cake.
But that's not the question. The question is, what is lost when someone is granted an entitlement to your cake. And in that case, what is lost is your freedom to choose for yourself whether to bake a cake. It's actually a very clear example of a right that can only be granted to one group by taking away a right from another group.
ponderingturtle
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Which of course would be a totally legal reason to refuse to bake any cake. Remember the issue here is about your right to refuse based on them being a protected group like gay, black or what have you. Refusing service for more profitable service is always allowed.
See why the guy claiming he got refused service for wearing a Trump hat had to claim wearing a trump hat at all times was a religious duty(and thus a protected class) when he got kicked out of a bar for being rude to the staff.
Where were all the conservatives supporting the bar for kicking him out for wearing a hat?
If you really don't want to bake people cakes, don't open a cake shop.
Drewbot
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Even worse, what if someone asked for an overtly racist cake?
Then the cake maker was forced to decide if it met his racist threshold.
Or maybe they should have a panel that would determine for the baker, if the cake was not racist enough for him to deny it.
Actually, how about you just let private business people decide for themselves what they want to make or not want to make? That is what we already do right?
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
I don't think you can get the information you're looking for, from the quote you cited.
In fact, I have several problems with that cite anyway.
Magrat
Mrs. Rincewind
Yes, but the issue was that the baker was turning down a profit because of "infringement on his/her religion". So they were LOSING profit, because if they made the cake they would feel they had LOST ________. The blank is what I'm asking about.
Apparently I am not the only one who questions what is actually being infringed upon. In the Autumn 2018 issue of Employee Relations Law Journal, a case was cited wherein an employee of a funeral parlor was fired after telling their boss they were transgender. The boss cited that his religion would be infringed upon by working with a transgendered person. He said (direct quote) "he terminated the plaintiff because his religious belief that transgendered persons and persons seeking to change their sex were acting against God's will". He also cited the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The boss lost the case.
More recently there has been a verdict in favor of a Christian baker by the Supreme Court. So what we have is many judicial verdicts, some going one way, some going another.
But I still do not see what the Christian is losing. They are losing money by turning down the order. What are they losing by filling it? Again I am referring to just an ordinary wedding cake, not participation in a ceremony, not making a cake with "Christians Suck!" on it.
The ISBN of the book is 978-0-8129-9541-1 and individual quoted is Paul Melanson. Though a google search you should be able to find plenty of news media coverage of his various activities and many quotes that support the statement recorded in the book. Please feel free to post any "problems" you have with the quote after you have researched and I'll address them as I am able.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
It depends on the specific circumstances, but one thing they lose is the opportunity to not participate in something they don't want to participate in.
If they're required to bake the cake anyway, they also lose the right to decide for themselves whether to bake the cake.
Do you disagree with/not understand either of these propositions?
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
In that case, I think the only person who can meaningfully answer your question is Paul Melanson. I'm not going to waste any time studying his body of work and trying to get inside his head, just to tryto give you an answer to what he might be thinking.
If you're thinking this needs to be a research project, you might as well do the research yourself, since someone has to do it and you're the one who wants an answer.