In misc.legal.moderated, on Wed, 21 Feb 2024 15:59:32 -0800 (PST), "John Levine" <
johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
According to micky <misc07@fmguy.com>:
color or race. However recently the Supreme Court said discrimination is >>>perfectly fine as long as you claim a religious reason for it.
Maybe this is a quibble, but I think they said it was legal, not
"perfectly fine".
They say what the law is, so in this case they mean the same thing,
If we're not talking about the wedding cake, please remind me of the
case involved.
We're probably talking about 303 Creative vs. Elenis, a totally
contrived case in which a web designer said she didn't want to design
a web site for a gay wedding. The case was contrived because the only
request that she do so was obviously from someone who wasn't looking
00000for a web site but only to give her an excuse to object.
Now if a nazi were having a party on
hitler's birthday and he wanted the baker to write "Hail to the Fuhrer"
on the cake, would you tell him he had to do that?
If you purport to run a business open to the public, you can't
discriminate against people on the basis of sex, which has been
interpreted to include sexual orientation.
Unless such a ban would conflict with the First Amendment, which takes precedence over statutes.
It's the same reason
you can't refuse to serve Blacks.
It's the same reason but the conflic is not present, since there is no religious distinction between Blacks and non-Blacks.
Except that now SCOTUS says
that if you claim it's because of religion, it's fine. You've
always been free to discriminate against Nazis who are not a
protected class.
My example was not chosen to find another protected class, but was meant
to illustrate that being forced to write something one seriously
disagrees with is an infringement on one's freedom. You do agree, do
you not, that in both cases, the gay wedding and the nazi, it's an
infringement on the baker's freedom.
The problem seems to be that people don't take the religious laws of
other religions, or even of their own sometimes, seriously.
You have it backwards. For the first 200 years or so, freedom of
religion meant the right to practice your own religion, but not to
force other people to practice it, too. Now that's changed.
Do you mean the gay couple would be forced to practice the baker's
religion? Hardly. He is not stopping their marriage, nor is he even preventing them from having a cake. They can decorate the cake
themselves or a buy a cake somewhere else.
I don't think this an example of a change, and I don't have it
backwards. If one is not allowed to marry someone of the same sex, one
is not allowed to promote it either. By forcing the baker to write words supporting gay marriage, you are forcing him to violate his religious obligation. He is not forcing anyone to do anything except NOT rely on
him to decorate the cake.
Relgious practice is not just rituaal and affirmative acts but also
includes refraning from prohibited acts.
In this week's SCOTUS orders list, Justice Alito made it quite clear
in his dissent where he would have accepted a case that the court
declined to hear:
In this case, the court below reasoned that a person who still holds traditional religious views on questions of sexual morality is
presumptively unfit to serve on a jury in a case involving a party who
is a lesbian.
This alone makes this case dissimilar from the bakey case, and makes
commenting on this case beyond my experience. I don't know how
standards of, I suppose, neutrality are applied to prospective jurors
when the issues are simpler, don't involve 1st Amendment issues for
example. Is a corn farmer inherently biased against a green-bean
farmer? Or, is a cattle rancher unable to be neutral when one party is
a sheep rancher? Since I don't know how even these non-religious
issues are resolved, I certainly can't reach a decision about what is
right when the issue involves a religious obligation.
Though I'm no fan of Alito and wouldn't be surprised if Alito is greatly
wrong.
That holding exemplifies the danger that I anticipated
in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015), namely, that Americans
who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be “labeled as bigots and treated as such” by
the government.
Did anyone involved in the case at hand label a juror with traditional
beliefs as a bigot? "Unfit to serve on the jury" is not the same as
being a bigot. There are loads of other reasons why people may have
views or a personal situation that mekes them unfit to serve on a jury.
Alito shouldn't make up something that didn't happen, and probably
didn't happen in Obergefell either. "Bigot" is a fighting word and
iirc there are different standards for the use of fighting words, so
Alito shouldn't use it unless someone else involved in the case already
has.
To point out the obvious, the reason they'd be labeled and treated as
bigots, is that they *are* bigots.
As I speculate above and afaik, no one involved in the case has called
such a person a bigot, but now you have. So, alas, Alito is right that
at least one or more wiil label such people as bigots. Because I
think, as I speculated in my previous post, you are one of those who
does not respect the religious laws or rules of traditional versions of Christianity, AFAIK in this case, a rule or law accepted by the
majority of Christians, or American Christians, whichever is more
relevant.
When the First Amendment said free excercise of religion, OF COURSE it
was talking about practices other people didn't practice and didn't
value, because if they did practice or value them, they would not be interfering or inclined to interfere with their practice by others.
Just like the presence of freedom of speech is measured by the
government's willingness to accept speech that the public disagrees
with, so too the presence of freedom of religion is measured by the government's willingness to accept religious practice that the public
disagrees with.
You have always had the right to be
as bigoted as you want, but the idea that there are no consequences
for your beliefs and that you can force them on other people is new
and, at least to me, profoundly wrong.
You uare continuing to assume here that they are bigots, rather than
people committed to their religion. I think the 1st Amendment calls
upon us to show respect to the religions of others, at least those not
created since the 60's ;-) , even if inside we think they are stupid.
In the bakery example, no one if forcing his belief on anyone. If he
couldn't bake the cake becuase he had Covid, no one would say he's
forcing Covid on a would-be customer. If he wouldn't bake a chocolate
wedding cake because he thought wedding cakes should be yellow or white
inside, (and we know this is not being used as an excuse because he
sells no chocolate cakes and has long had a sign in the store, "No
Chocolate Cakes for Sale", no one would say he's forcing his belief,
his disllike of chocolate, on a would-be customer.
The recent example that brought out Alito's comment, which I think is
303 Creative vs. Elenis, even if I read more I don't think I could get
up to speed on jury voir dir. (But I am currently trying to find if
the word bigot was used by anyone in addtion to Alito.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/022024zor_ggco.pdf
--
I think you can tell, but just to be sure:
I am not a lawyer.
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