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Originally posted by ChastMastr:
But -- the law has to apply equally to everyone,

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:

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Originally posted by mousethief:

I don't see a problem with a baker deciding not to do cakes with political messages, to avoid having to do political messages they find abhorrent.

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So your position is that, if a baker makes someone a cake that says "Conserve Energy - Save the Planet", or "No War for Oil", he should be obliged to make a "Free Ratko Mladic" cake should a customer so desire?

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Pretty much.

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
But the Tories, (I think) are not part of a group with protected characteristics. Gay people are.

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
OK, I find that position as bizarre as you evidently find mine, but I don't think we are going to convince each other here.

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
OK, I find that position as bizarre as you evidently find mine, but I don't think we are going to convince each other here.

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On the contrary. I don't find yours bizarre, I find it dangerous. It's the first step to apartheid.

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
Oi, you can't complain about me using 'slippery slope' arguments against you and then use one yourself.

The 'brakes' on my position are perfectly clear. You can refuse specific ideas but not people. You can refuse a pro-SSM order or a pro-Serb nationalism order but you cannot refuse a gay man or a Serb. This is because people have rights but ideas don't.

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
If the baker regularly serves Serbs but refuses when a Serb asks for a Ratko Mladić cake, then it's pretty obvious the discrimination is against the idea, not the Serbian people.

I agree there is a problem if the Serb who places the order is the only Serb who has ever come into the bakery, but then the test is the willingness of the baker to say something like 'No, but I will do you a lovely Bakewell Tart in the shape of St Sava's Cathedral if you like'.

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Originally posted by orfeo:
That's going to create even more evidentiary problems than the alternative...

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The response is going to be "if I wanted a tart in the shape of St Sava's Cathedral I would have asked for a bloody tart in the shape of St Sava's Cathedral". There can be few things more annoying, in that kind of commercial context, than being offered things that aren't what you wanted.

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
Only in the sense that not serving chicken in a restaurant is discriminatory against patrons who like chicken. All customers of the bakery get exactly the same options.

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Originally posted by LeRoc:
Maybe we should grant bakeries the right to put small disclaimers on their cakes? Something like "The confection of this cake by Blessed Bakery doesn't imply that forementioned Bakery endorses the message and/or image displayed thereupon. No juridical liability of the Bakery should be implied by the confection of this message or and/image." I bet it would taste good in mocca!

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Originally posted by Lucia:
On reading a little more about this case here I see that the bakers are claiming that they have previously refused orders

"He added that it was not the first time his company had refused cake orders: "In the past, we've declined several orders which have contained pornographic images and offensive, foul language."

If this is the case does it support their assertion that their refusal was to do with the message on the cake rather than the protected characteristic of the person ordering it? That is that LGBT people are not the only ones who have had orders refused.

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Originally posted by mdijon:
Aren't musicians artists?

I think they can legitimately arbitrarily determine their subject matter - for instance a musician can decline to play certain pieces,

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or a tattooist can decline to do a swastika - but they can't legitimately arbitrarily refuse customers based on their race, sexuality or religion.

I would not accept that a wedding photographer refusing particular customers is like an artist choosing subject matter though. Like you say it is a service provision, and the customer it the customer, not the subject matter of an artistic endeavour.

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
Only in the sense that not serving chicken in a restaurant is discriminatory against patrons who like chicken. All customers of the bakery get exactly the same options.

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Originally posted by LeRoc:
Maybe we should grant bakeries the right to put small disclaimers on their cakes? Something like "The confection of this cake by Blessed Bakery doesn't imply that forementioned Bakery endorses the message and/or image displayed thereupon. No juridical liability of the Bakery should be implied by the confection of this message or and/image." I bet it would taste good in mocca!

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They've been doing it for years. It's usually on the bottom of the cake or the filling of the top layer.

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Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
Only in the sense that not serving chicken in a restaurant is discriminatory against patrons who like chicken. All customers of the bakery get exactly the same options.

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Isn't this getting a little close to the argument "Of course gay men have the same rights as straight ones - all men, of whatever sexuality, are able to marry a single consenting woman of their choice?"

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
Only in the sense that not serving chicken in a restaurant is discriminatory against patrons who like chicken. All customers of the bakery get exactly the same options.

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Not really. If you offer a service roughly along the lines of "we will put your message on a cake", it gets pretty dicey to start picking and choosing. That's more like the actions of a private club or similar organization, not a business open to the general public. If you offer a service more along the lines of "we will put any of this list of pre-defined messages on a cake", then everyone is getting exactly the same options.

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Originally posted by orfeo:
It is almost always possible to frame something in a different way to make it look a little less discriminatory. Most discrimination, these days at least, is not direct and explicit. But that is why courts/laws developed notions of indirect discrimination, to try to look at the context and the practical impact and to avoid technical arguments like "but gay men are free to marry the woman of their choice".

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
That said, SSM is currently unrecognised in Northern Ireland. We are in very strange legal territory if refusing to help campaign for gay marriage is illegal discrimination, but refusing to allow gay people actually to get married is not.

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Originally posted by Ricardus:

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Originally posted by orfeo:
It is almost always possible to frame something in a different way to make it look a little less discriminatory. Most discrimination, these days at least, is not direct and explicit. But that is why courts/laws developed notions of indirect discrimination, to try to look at the context and the practical impact and to avoid technical arguments like "but gay men are free to marry the woman of their choice".

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It's to avoid accusations of indirect discrimination that I and others have pointed out that straight people support SSM too.

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
If you say you will print anything the customer asks for, and then don't, that's probably a breach of the Trades Description Act regardless of the discrimination issue. If you specify there is an editorial policy, and that applies to everyone, I am not sure there is a problem except that I shouldn't have used the word 'options'. Maybe 'house rules' would have been better.

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Originally posted by mousethief:

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Originally posted by Ricardus:
If you say you will print anything the customer asks for, and then don't, that's probably a breach of the Trades Description Act regardless of the discrimination issue. If you specify there is an editorial policy, and that applies to everyone, I am not sure there is a problem except that I shouldn't have used the word 'options'. Maybe 'house rules' would have been better.

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But then you get into the definition problem of what the policy is that applies to everyone. Neither the rich nor the poor may sleep on park benches. That applies to everyone, but it still discriminates. You can say "neither racists nor non-racists can have a cake with a racist slogan" but you're still discriminating against one group and not the other, even though ostensibly you are applying your rule to everyone.

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Originally posted by orfeo:

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Originally posted by Ricardus:

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Originally posted by orfeo:
It is almost always possible to frame something in a different way to make it look a little less discriminatory. Most discrimination, these days at least, is not direct and explicit. But that is why courts/laws developed notions of indirect discrimination, to try to look at the context and the practical impact and to avoid technical arguments like "but gay men are free to marry the woman of their choice".

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It's to avoid accusations of indirect discrimination that I and others have pointed out that straight people support SSM too.

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You're actually walking straight into accusations of indirection discrimination. The definition of indirect discrimination is generally wider than you appear to think. It covers requirements or conditions that are likely to have the effect of disadvantaging the protected group, or with which a substantially higher proportion of other people can comply with compared to the protected group.

One of the most notable sex discrimination cases in Australian legal history involved the firing of workers from a steelworks. The basic principle was last hired, first fired. Only thing was, it had only been in fairly recent times that women had succeeded in getting hired in most jobs.

The company tried to say "but we'll be firing men too". The company lost. It was indirect discrimination.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Now this i don't get. Any work, of course. Photography, cake decorating, singing--none of these are vital emergency services that will cause somebody death or bodily harm if denied. Go find another freaking singer or whatever. They .ay be srongheaded stupid asses, but it' s not my prerogative to force them. To take a more serious example, there are restaurants and even banks in this town that won't serve my mixed race family. I may point and laugh, or write nasty reviews on the internet, but in the end it is their freedom--freedom even to make asses of themselves. For me to try to force such people would be as small-minded and inexcusable as they are.

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Originally posted by Antisocial Alto:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
I suppose what I am recommending is that we refrain from passing new, sweeping laws in a fit of pique, simply because we can (see: current political climate) and because we are failing to distinguish between real harm and simple insult. And perhaps because we are unwilling to tackle the hard work of deciding where the line between the two lies.

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How many times, in your view, does a person have to be "simply insulted" before it becomes real harm? If a group of kids shouts "fag" at your son on the bus every day, does that not eventually cause him real harm?

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Originally posted by Mark Betts:
[[ LIKED ]] by Mark Betts.

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. . . isn't racial discrimination just as illegal in the UK if not more so??

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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity

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Originally posted by orfeo:
It'd be very interesting to see how the discriminators would behave if it was made more of their problem.

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(Rod Serling voice)

Submitted for your approval...



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My essays on comics continuity: http://chastmastr.tumblr.com/tagged/continuity

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Originally posted by orfeo:
How about we let businesses discriminate so long as they have the guts to put signs on the door? You know "WHITES ONLY", or "NO QUEERS". Be public about it. Let all their other customers know how they treat people.

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Originally posted by orfeo:
It'd be very interesting to see how the discriminators would behave if it was made more of their problem.

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Originally posted by Anglican't:

Given that we've spent several pages discussing the activities of a small bakery in Northern Ireland, can we not say that we've reached the point where it can very much be the discriminator's problem? If people feel that they’ve been wronged they’re often not afraid to hit Twitter, etc. to complain about it.

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Originally posted by Palimpsest:

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Originally posted by Anglican't:

Given that we've spent several pages discussing the activities of a small bakery in Northern Ireland, can we not say that we've reached the point where it can very much be the discriminator's problem? If people feel that they’ve been wronged they’re often not afraid to hit Twitter, etc. to complain about it.

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Sure, and you can eliminate the laws against armed robbery because the robbed can write about it on twitter. That will be the robber's problem. What an odd idea of justice.

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One of the reasons businesses think they can still get away with this kind of behaviour is because they count on no-one hearing about besides the person who is discriminated against.

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