This is completely false. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, “prohibits discrimination by privately owned places of public accommodation on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin.”
Wasn't the original case here something along the lines of refusing to bake a cake with homosexual imagery on it, not necessarily because the customers were a homosexual couple?
The OP's point should be revised: It's the bakers right to bake cakes however they want. And that's mostly true. If a KKK member came in and asked for a cake with lynching imagery on it, its their right to refuse service. Everything more morally noble than that is just shades of gray, and you do not want the courts and law getting involved in that kind of shades of gray. Leave it to the markets.
I'm increasingly convinced that the left is moving us toward a 1984-era world of pushing every little offense into the courts and law. They don't understand how important these fundamental liberties are, which doesn't mean they can't be tempered with things like the Civil Rights Act, but the spirit is still important. When the 2A goes, that's when its all over.
>Wasn't the original case here something along the lines of refusing to bake a cake with homosexual imagery on it, not necessarily because the customers were a homosexual couple?
No. They had not discussed the content of the cake when they were refused service.
>I'm increasingly convinced that the left is moving us toward a 1984-era world...
Of course you are, because that narrative creates fear and fear sells.
Considering you’re not aware of the basic facts of this case, if your perception of such cases informs your paranoid worldview then perhaps it’s time to reassess it.
> Everything more morally noble than that is just shades of gray, and you do not want the courts and law getting involved in that kind of shades of gray. Leave it to the markets.
The Civil Rights Act seems to have worked out fine. The legal ability to refuse to sell houses to KKK members, but not to black people, seems to have not caused serious problems in society, a lack of fundamental liberties, whatever. Are there serious problems that I'm not noticing?
Generally speaking the interpretation “it’s the bakers right to bake cakes however they want” works how the law works - though of course that type of rule can still lead to discrimination (e.g. I don’t sell houses in that “neighborhood”).
However, your point about the left moving us towards orwellianism due to over litigating seems like B.S. to me. The second amendment isn’t a freedom canary (see australia). The Right just used the courts to redefine money as speech.
I don’t see how free speech is destoryed if sexual orientation or gender expression become protected classes like race, or country of origin.
OP was referring to the expression of free speech, which though the court didn’t rule on would likely have given the same outcome. Designing the cake and decorating could easily fall under free speech, and weakening the 1st amendment is a bad idea.
Imagine you’re a Jewish artist and sell your premade work in a gallery to the public, and also offer custom portrait commissions. An avowed Nazi can come and purchase your paintings, but you should never be forced to paint their portrait. You can imagine this scenario any number of ways, gay artist and fundamentalist anti-gay preacher for instance.
It’s not so much a slippery slope as a bright line, once you give the majority that power it will be abused.
I tend to agree at a high level, but what if the baker refused to bake for black people? Is that still ok? What if it wasn’t a baker, but a grocer or a pharmacist? What if it’s the only baker in town? Where should the line be drawn, and why there?
Isn't the issue not refusing the group, but refusing work related to the group? Say there was a bakery that refused to make a NAACP cake, but which served people of any race from their normal selection of cakes? Even if one was to say that is wrong, it seems less wrong than fully denying any service to a person.
This Latino place down the street serves the best rice and beans ever, they also wont server you if you're wearing pants falling off your ass(literal sign). The 7-11 won't serve you unless you're wearing a shirt, and shoes. Businesses can server whoever the hell they want.
Your statement is quite ignorant. There is a massive difference between business-specific dress codes (both of your examples), and discrimination based on the way a person was born.
Inadequate clothing is not a protected class under the Civil Rights Act. Hence there are major legal differences between refusing to serve a person because they are black, and refusing to serve a person because they are shirtless.
They could have gotten a cake if they had been willing to get one that didn't specifically express the homosexual nature of the wedding. The baker had no problem selling them a generic cake, the issue was that he didn't want to make a cake that expressed a message he disagreed with.
No they can't. Exposing your ass and being shirtless aren't protected classes. You can't refuse service because someone is black, because it is a protected class.
That's not how the law treats, say, selling houses: it's not a homeowner's right to sell their house to whomever they feel like selling for and not whomever they don't, if that feeling involves discrimination on race.
I think this discussion is likely to be more productive if folks who hold the belief you're holding also state what their agreement is with existing laws restricting how people can participate in the market: if you also disagree with housing anti-discrimination laws, that's fine, but it'll be easier to understand your position if you say you're advocating for those being unjust too. If you don't, I'm curious where you draw the distinction.
The counter argument being: what if instead of gay these people were African American? Could you refuse service then? Suppose it wasn’t cakes but a restaurant? In both instances, a minority is being refused service because of their specific minority status.
It was a common position in Christianity at certain points in this nation's history that black people should have less rights than white people. Literally the Southern Baptist Convention came into existence because the northern Baptists were too anti-slavery. "But religion" doesn't let you separate distinctions on sexual orientation from distinctions on race.
(Disclosure, I'm Christian, but also I'm a non-white member of the whitest mainline Protestant denomination in the US....)
You can't force them to bake a cake for someone, but you can fine them, throw them in jail, or put them out of business for refusing.
However, I suggest reading the Court's opinions to see what reasons they actually used in their ruling.[1]
Their ruling focused largely on how they felt that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC) didn't properly respect the baker's religious beliefs, and that the CCRC has demonstrated inconsistencies with their rulings on other similar cases.
Civil Rights Act extends protections to "protected groups"
As of now, does not include sexual orientation (as far as I can tell), although other bodies have interpreted sexual orientation to be protected (Equal Opportunity Employment)
From a legal perspective you absolutely can. That is the purpose of having a legal system after all. If someone behaves otherwise then that's where the justice system comes in.
If the custom cake was an expression of free speech, forcing the baker to do so would be compelled speech. The principle you use to compel that speech would have broad implications for artists, writers, and all other creators.
In the south many restaurants did not sell to African-Americans. Those restaurants did very well in the free market compared to restaurants that sold to African-Americans.
These laws exist because the market doesn't work the way we want them to. If discriminatory businesses failed because they were discriminatory, we wouldn't need such laws.
If people didn't recognize discrimination, we wouldn't have enacted those laws.
The market would have eventually driven these discriminatory businesses to bankruptcy. Majority public opinion had changed. That's why we were able to pass the laws. Would there be some holdouts? Maybe, but they probably wouldn't have lasted in the face of protests and pickets and lack of customers. Those that did would not be numerous enough to matter.
If you don’t believe that discriminatory companies don’t necessarily fail because they discriminate against minorities (especially small businesses in segregated communities), I kindly suggest you read Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294 (1964) and Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U.S. 241 (1964).
The landscape may have evolved since, especially with large companies, but if you don’t believe there are still scores of small businesses in small towns who get away with discrimination on a frequent basis, you should get out some more.
The markets didn’t decide to only allow bakers that served all races to stay in business - the federal government passed a law that required bakers to serve all races and the market complied.
Capitalism actially straight up sometimes requires regulation. Sorry.
I'm coming to the conclusion that when the economic system is Capitalism the goverment will become a Plutocracy, regardless of how well regulated it is.
Money is power, and nothing concentrates wealth like capitalism.
They are a public accommodation and laws apply to them. He isn't compelled to bake them a cake, but only in the sense that he isn't compelled to operate a company that sells cakes to the public.
That's a disingenuous argument. They didn't say "we don't serve gays here", they said "we don't want to make a custom cake as requested".
If a gay person walked in, picked a cake off the shelf and said "I'd like to buy this cake" and was refused for being gay, that's a different story. As in that would literally be a completely different story than what happened.
At the time the cake was requested, state law afforded storekeepers some latitude to decline to create specific messages the storekeeper considered offensive. In fact, during the time this case was making its way through the courts the Colorado Civil Rights Commission upheld 3 other bakers' rights to decline to make cakes with messages that they thought were demeaning to gay persons or gay marriage.
They do, but I imagine there are quite a few (all?) cake shops that would refuse to make cakes with particular messages. What if, for example, a gay owned bakery was asked by a Muslim Imam to make a cake with the message "Thank Allah for the Pulse nightclub shooting"? Would the bakery be in violation of the CRA as they are discriminating on the basis of religion?
The question in this case was not whether the baker would sell a cake to a gay person (he was willing to do so), it was whether the baker had to make a cake with a particular message that he felt violated his personal and deeply held beliefs.
No, per the article the baker was not refusing to "make a cake with a specific message", he refused to make any custom cake for gay couples.
>The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Mr. Phillips’s free speech rights had not been violated, noting that the couple had not discussed the cake’s design before Mr. Phillips turned them down.
Actually you can and this is a good thing in many cases. Though in some cases you end up in a gray area where it’s not so clear what is right. We force doctors to treat people and in certain circumstances they are forced to treat people even if they can’t pay. We force pharmacists to fill prescriptions. We prevent landlords from discriminating against protected classes.
In the case at hand I think the court got it right. I sympathize with the sentiment that a business owner ought to be able to turn down business but I don’t deny that there are situations where this shouldn’t be the case.
The cake was meant to be a celebration of the gay marriage; the two are directly related. It's not the same as all of the racial segregation comparisons people are so quick spew on here.
What if your religion says that "black people are inferior to white people?"
This is at the very nature of the debate: Are people of different sexualities HUMAN rights, in EXACTLY the same way that people of different ethnicities are.
Because if they are, civil rights supercede religious rights. ("Your fist's freedom ends where my face begins")
Time and time again the US falls on the side that "no, gay people are not entitled to civil rights", diametrically opposite from every other western nation.
That would have nothing to do with characteristics of their marriage, that'd be simple racial discrimination. The marriage would be an arbitrary detail in that scenario. I don't hold the same position as him, but if the guy genuinely believes he'd be punished in the afterlife for celebrating a same-sex marriage, then leave him alone. A wedding cake is not a basic human right.
It's exactly the same. "The cake was meant to be a celebration of a Black marriage, and the plaintiff's religion doesn't accept Black people as human."
Except if the reason they are refusing them service is because they are a member of a protected class. This was a core issue of the civil rights movement.
It could be argued that forcing a business owner to provide a service they don’t want to perform is assault by the state (protected classes notwithstanding).
What if a business owner’s religion precludes then from serving a protected class or someone with a disability? Which takes precedence?
But the business owner in this case is specifically offering to provide the service (baking a cake to your requirements) already. Unless they aren't, and they just offer a number of predesigned, off-the-shelf cakes, but it doesn't sound like that's the case here.
It is a 'public accommodation' within the meaning of the legal definition: i.e., a place where the general public may freely enter and do business. Civil rights law forbids discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, religion, or national origin. If a Christian baker said, we don't serve Jews, they'd get sued in a minute.
i think the argument is that, while refusing to serve the gay couple at all would be illegal discrimination, refusing to make a cake with their specific design is not. although i find it gross that people would have an issue making this type of cake, i find the free speech angle somewhat compelling in this case.
Per the article, the baker did not know a specific design, he categorically refused to make any custom cake for them.
>The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Mr. Phillips’s free speech rights had not been violated, noting that the couple had not discussed the cake’s design before Mr. Phillips turned them down.
ELISP is a pretty fast language, faster than VimScript or JS for sure.
EDIT: Also, Emacs is bloated is bloated because it's not just a editor its's an Web Browser, Email Client, News Reader, Music Player and File Manager. If people want a light emacs, they can go use uEmacs or become the last JEDi.
It's a good glue language, like Python. Better than Python in the sense that its internal representation is based on tagged values instead of ubiquitous pointers: for example, 43243 represents itself and isn't a pointer to a some reference-counted PyObject representing an int.
And because Emacs Lisp a lisp, you get extensive syntactic malleability that you can use to build DSLs and convenience facilities.
> V8 among with some other JITs are some of the fastest engines in the world
I find that doubtful, when the jvm is so close to native code in terms of performance, and mozilla said that wasm (or was it asm.js? Forget which) was still 50% slower theoretically than native code.
Hotspot among with other JVMs are no doubt fast -- but partially that came from Java being a static and compiled language.
Not saying that JavaScript is faster, but JavaScript is fast. If you look at the benchmarks I posted, you'll notice that 50% slower is hardly the norm -- many benchmarks have the VMs performing at a near-native performance, and the VMs are even faster in some cases.
In fact, number crunching in JavaScript has been fast for a long time, and even faster than Java in some cases: http://www.stefankrause.net/wp/?p=144
I'm not trying to advocate JavaScript's performance in anyway however. I'm merely pointing out the fact that performance cannot be single-handedly described as "fast" or "slow", especially "for sure". Context matters. A lot.
I suspect it means something like "according to calculations using a noticeably approximate model of reality". That's what people tend to mean, anyway. "Theoretically" is often code for "My model does not correspond to reality".
It annoys me, actually, that "theory" has this negative connotation of noncorrespondance.
You can, but it's probably not worth the effort. Most of that's in the form of lazy-loaded byte code. Other than some lightweight stubs for the entry points, Emacs doesn't load those pieces until you use them.
This comment is the exact reason a text internet is still needed, because otherwise it will turn into a lag fest full of strange Javascript frameworks just to show a single article.
