There have been a couple anti-discrimination cases in the news recently that seem to me to hurt the goal behind the complaints. A bakery in Ireland has had a complaint filed for refusing to make a cake that depicts gay marriage, and recently a bakery in Colorado lost a complaint filed against them for refusing to make a cake for a gay wedding. While I don't like the decisions these bakeries have made, I find the discrimination complaints against them troubling. I wanted to think through the reasons for that.
One thing I do to evaluate the justice of a situation is to reverse the roles and see if I come to a similar conclusion. So I imagine myself in the role of a bakery, being asked to make a cake for an anti-gay organization or event. I would find it reprehensible to be asked to do that. If I did it because I thought it was just business or because I expected a legal attempt to force me to do it, I would actually be making myself complict in the anti-gay organization's activities. I think it would be quite reasonable to refuse this order, and intolerable to be legally coerced into fulfilling it. I'd rather go out of business than support someone who is fundamentally opposed to me. Turning the roles back around, while I don't agree with the anti-gay sentiments of these bakeries in the news, I certainly can understand why they don't want to make these cakes.
In general, I support anti-discrimination legislation. But I don't think it should be applied in these cases. I've come up with two reasons for this in the present context: artistic freedom, and size of business.
Artistic Freedom: There is a difference between a business that provides a general service to the public, and one that makes custom items for clients. A business that provides a service to the general public should not be able to discriminate in who it provides that service to. Anybody should be able to enter the business, buy items off the shelf, use its services, etc. In the bakery example, if they have pre-made cakes, anybody should be able to buy them. Even if they know the cake will be used in a situation they don't agree with, well, normally you don't ask the intended use of your product after you sell it and can't control it, so that shouldn't be a reason not to sell it.
The difference for these situations in the news is that they have been asked to make custom cakes. They are being asked to apply their own expertise and artistry to depict something they don't like. Controlling people's artistic expression is a mechanism to limit freedom of thought and is not something that should happen in a democratic and free society. I don't want my own expression forced against my own views any more than these bakeries do, and it is a very bad precedent for the pro-gay side to attempt to impose this. It legitimizes the same practice that has been historically practiced against us by the other side. Some might argue that we're the ones advocating equality, so we're in the right to impose our views while the others were in the wrong, but it would be unlikely to put the two sides in the room and come up with an objective way (that both sides agree with) to evaluate whose views are right. A tolerant society, which we want because we want to be tolerated, requires tolerating people whose views you don't like. We don't go so far in tolerating intolerance as to allow interference with our own lives, but simply refusing a commission does not cross that line.
Size of Organization: This goes into my views of the reasonable extent of government regulation. There is a lot of legal background that I certainly don't have expertise in, so my views might not fit into the current legal framework, but I think there is a different interest in regulating a large organization than a small one. Large organizations have disproportionate power over their employees, customers, competitors, and communities, so we need stricter and uniform regulations. In the case of Hobby Lobby being granted an religiously-grounded exemption to the government requirements on its employment pracctices - that is a problem, notwithstanding my views on individual freedom expressed above. If they were a small organization, the impact on others of their employment decision would also be small. If employees don't like the terms of employment, it would be easy to find another place to work. If customers don't want to support a business with contrary views, they can take their business elsewhere. But if the business is a large chain, these remedies are harder to obtain. There may not be other companies in the line of business for customers to patronize, and there may be less alternatives for job-seekers to find suitable conditions. So I think larger businesses do need to be regulated to common standards, and the religious views of the owners shouldn't exempt them from that regulation.
The bakeries above, though, are small businesses (the Irish one might be on the edge for that argument, but the artistic freedom argument still applies). I don't think their choice not to serve a certain customer was damaging to the customer - there were other bakeries available to fulfill the order. Rather than file an inappropriate anti-discrimination complaint, a more effective remedy would have been to put the word out that the company does not support the gay community. They would quickly see the economic impact of their choices, and decide whether to live with it or not. If I ran a bakery and refused to make a cake with an anti-gay message, I would happily accept the boycott from people who aren't friendly to me anyways. I would prefer that to being legislated into doing something reprehensible.
Imposing a behaviour through a human rights process, in the face of the considerations above that recognize diversity, works against those of us who want a tolerant and pluralistic society. This is why I find myself on the opposite side of where I might be expected to be in these instances.
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