Transgender bathrooms?

[Buster's Uncle]

Ninja'd

...Let me point out, though, that by any reasonable Christian standard, being married by a judge is not a real marriage - is it?  Is it not tacit complicity in something against your beliefs to contribute to ANY wedding not before a preacher man of a denomination you don't find hopelessly blasphemous in its doctrine?  Like, flowers arrangements for a Christian Science-officiated wedding is wrong for the nice church lady, according to her own lights if only she'd thought it through.

I mean, marriage is a religious issue right? (A legal own-goal every time you shrill it out, social "conservatives") and that nice brown Hindu couple you know isn't really married, whether it's any of your business or not -and your uncle and his 'wife' who went before a judge are openly living in sin- or it's live and let live, and Mark and Steve's legal arrangement is really, REALLY none of your business.  You can't pick and choose about what Jesus, who I don't recall ever discussing what marriage is, wants.

Permit me to guarantee, for a woman I never met on the other side of the continent, that none of this would have ever come up in her sweet -and I discern, not terribly bright- head were it not for a lot of shouting and hard feelings to do with current events of recent years having come to her attention.  Her heart was big enough for the sweet gay guy who patronized her shop, and she'd have probably been shocked at he was marrying his boyfriend, but done what she always had - thought it was a pity a nice guy was that way, and tried not to think about it while she worked on the order...

[Elok]

Again, I don't think our legal standards should depend on our parsing whether or not one party or the other's beliefs appear sensible or internally consistent.  She objects to providing the service.  The service is not critical--nobody will die without it, or even suffer significant measurable harm (hurt feelings are perfectly impossible to quantify).  In the absence of any other, more compelling consideration, that really should be end-of-story.  Forget the KKKake.  Suppose a wealthy ten-year-old, money-wielding butler in tow, goes into your bakery and asks for a cake with the word "FART!" on it in big neon-green letters.  You say no, because no.  I feel you should be legally allowed to leave it at that.  The law should not get into judging the relative merits of people's tastes, opinions or beliefs in such circumstances unless there is an overwhelmingly important reason for doing so, since it's impossible to create a fair and objectively measurable standard which applies to every case in a clear way.

[Buster's Uncle]

You know, if it was a restaurant and black at issue, people get terribly het up about that, and I don't know that they shouldn't - and I doubt any of us would be interested in kicking it around.

There's probably a reasonable line, but where is it?

[Elok]

Taken as groups, homosexuals are vastly better off than black people today, let alone in 1960.  If a black man walked into a bakery in Alabama in 1960 and asked for a cake that said, "We shall overcome!  Black is beautiful," I would give that man less than a week before the Klan strung him and his family up, and burned down his house.  If a gay man asks for a wedding cake today, even without any law preventing the baker from refusing . . . the gay man may have to find another bakery.  Violence against homosexuals is distressingly common, but the very nature of gayness (a transracial, synthetic community born from typically straight unions), together with host of other factors, makes a systematic persecution comparable to Jim Crow highly unlikely.

[Buster's Uncle]

I dunno that any system but zero tolerance of discrimination makes sense from a secular POV view, man.  (That's the futility of the faithful involving themselves in Caesar's worldly government - it only leads to strife, never manages to make things more godly, only cheapens the public behavior of the faithful and gets them in bed with horrible people, and makes the devout look like bigots and jerks, not least 'cause that's how the politically-active ones end up behaving in public.  Dr. Dobson endorsed the Pig the other day.)

Suppressing the impulse to bring up some extreme-case hypotheticals...

[BU Admin]

The management regrets to note that a we have a member abusing the report system.

Rules lawyers are not licensed to practice at AC2, as per publicly-announced policy, and further attempts to game the system will not be tolerated.

[Rusty Edge]

I was asked to share this from the presidential thread I've embellished some pronouns for clarity -

[Gary Johnson is taking flack today from both the TheoCons and the Libertarians. The issue is "Religious Liberty". The subject came up in a recent interview or two. Gary took some heat for standing up for the '64 Civil Rights Act in a debate at the Libertarian Convention this year. Purist Libertarians believe that the government has no right to tell you what you can do on your own property, or penalize you for what you think or say.

TheoCons seem to disregard the Golden Rule, and use the term "Religious Liberty" to deny services to people they don't approve of, or refuse services they don't approve of - Pharmacists denying birth control pills because they believe life begins at conception, Doctors refusing to perform abortions and sterilizations, County Clerks denying marriage licenses to same sex couples, Social workers denying them adoptions, businesses denying various service to gays.

Gary's thinking is that religious based discrimination is still discrimination, which is wrong. If you can discriminate against sinners, why not other religions, too? First the gays, then the Muslims. Where does it end?

Maybe somebody might  think it's not a problem in the age of social media, but then maybe they  haven't lived rural where there's a lack of goods and services, much less competition, or been stranded while traveling. ]

[Rusty Edge]

I read this in a political context, but it appears relevant-

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/magazine/what-are-the-limits-of-religious-liberty.html?_r=0

What Are the Limits of ‘Religious Liberty’?

First Words
By EMILY BAZELON  JULY 7, 2015

‘‘I can’t. It’s against my religion.’’ Americans tend to handle religious objections with care, personally and politically. When a guest says, for example, that he can’t eat the food being served because it’s not kosher or halal, the host usually hastens to find an alternative. And when people resist following a law on the basis of faith, the government and the courts may try to accommodate them. It’s an American legacy that dates back to before the founding, when some of the original colonies were set up as havens for religious dissenters. Under the banner of belief, Quakers and Mennonites in the 18th century won the right not to join state militias. The first conscientious objectors were religious objectors, and from there, the category expanded to include moral opponents of war. The same pattern holds for home-schoolers. It was an Amish father, not a hippie mother, who first got the Supreme Court’s permission to take his children out of school in 1972, based on his religious commitment to ‘‘life aloof from the world,’’ as the justices respectfully put it.

Making exceptions to the law for people of faith has become part of the American definition of religious tolerance, part of our ethos of live and let live. It has also helped keep the peace in a polyglot nation. In France, it’s illegal for a Muslim woman to wear a head scarf at a public school. In the United States, it’s illegal for a clothing store to refuse to hire a Muslim woman because she wore a head scarf to her job interview. When the Supreme Court issued that ruling last month, eight of nine justices agreed that Samantha Elauf, who lost out on a job at Abercrombie Kids because of a companywide policy banning head coverings, was asking for ‘‘favored treatment’’ — to which she was entitled by federal employment law. ‘‘This is really easy,’’ Justice Antonin Scalia said, announcing the decision from the bench.

And yet we’ve arrived at an unfortunate impasse over the meaning of religious liberty. Unlike in earlier eras, when religious objections let the faithful separate themselves from institutions they felt they could not support, many conservatives now deploy the phrase as a way of excluding other people. Take the furious outcry that erupted in response to the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision to make same-sex marriage legal in every state. Conservative pushback began with the dissenting justices: Clarence Thomas warned of ‘‘potentially ruinous consequences for religious liberty.’’ Some Republican officeholders rushed to throw up whatever shield they could for people of faith. Two states have declared that county clerks may refrain from issuing marriage licenses if they don’t want to give them to gay couples as a matter of conscience. Bakers, photographers and florists — and adoption agencies and landlords — who cite their religion when refusing to serve gay couples won assurances like this one from Greg Abbott, governor of Texas: ‘‘No Texan is required by the Supreme Court’s decision to act contrary to his or her religious beliefs regarding marriage.’’

The same-sex-marriage resisters hope to capitalize on a recent expansion of religious liberties, in another big case about modern-day sexual norms. In a divisive 5-to-4 ruling last year, the Supreme Court extended to a company, and not just to individuals, the right to mount a religious objection to a law. The craft-store chain Hobby Lobby, which is owned by evangelicals, refused to pay for certain forms of birth control for its female employees, as the Affordable Care Act requires. The owners argued that providing health insurance that covered emergency contraception and IUDs offended their evangelical beliefs, saying these methods induce abortions (by taking effect after fertilization). Hobby Lobby had little scientific support for that assertion. By contrast, in defending the contraception mandate, the Obama administration could cite the consensus medical view that providing a variety of birth-control methods benefits women’s health. Nonetheless, the court sided with Hobby Lobby and its sense of conscience.

The court’s decision led to a burst of feminist outrage, but Hobby Lobby didn’t face a sustained boycott. And so it was surprising when another push for religious objection crashed into a wall of public condemnation earlier this year. Legislators in Indiana and Arkansas expected a smooth ride for their versions of a bill called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The first law by that name was passed by Congress in 1993 by huge, bipartisan margins. R.F.R.A. established a balancing test that remains in effect: When someone complains that a federal law substantially burdens his or her free exercise of religion, the government must show that it has a compelling interest in applying that law.

The R.F.R.A.s proposed in Indiana and Arkansas were more expansive: They would have allowed people and corporations to bring religious-liberty claims against one another, as well as the government. But that change didn’t really explain why Indiana and Arkansas found themselves on the wrong side of the culture wars; the context did. The new religious-liberty bills appeared to be shielding businesses that didn’t want to serve gay couples, who had recently won the right to marry in Indiana. ‘‘If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no,’’ Crystal O’Connor, an owner of Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Ind., told a local news station. This time, the boycott materialized, and Memories Pizza temporarily shut its doors (supporters also raised more than $800,000 on the owners’ behalf). When major companies threatened to pull up stakes in Indiana and Arkansas, the states retreated, altering their religious-freedom bills.

Following the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling, religious objections to serving gay couples are mounting in more states. Invoking religious liberty in this way presents ‘‘special concerns’’ by prolonging social conflict, according to a recent article by two law professors, Reva B. Siegel of Yale and Douglas NeJaime now of U.C.L.A. School of Law. They point to the aftermath of Roe v. Wade: After the Supreme Court ruling legalized abortion throughout the country, Congress and state legislatures ensured that a doctor, nurse or other health care professional could refuse to participate in providing an abortion as a matter of conscience. Over the decades, these ‘‘conscience clauses’’ expanded in some states to include counseling, referral and pharmaceutical services, allowing people who fill prescriptions, for example, to exert a form of social control in the name of their own religious freedom.

The muscle of the conservative Christian movement, Siegel and NeJaime argue, enhances its ‘‘power to demean.’’ Women who have been refused abortion services report feeling judged and mortified. Gay couples turned away by wedding vendors say the same. ‘‘The phrase ‘religious liberty’ has become an overused talisman,’’ the Indiana University law professor Steve Sanders told me. ‘‘Most of the invocations lately have nothing to do with actual infringements of free exercise. They’re about political and cultural dissent from gay rights.’’

All of this is making longtime proponents of religious liberty nervous. Douglas Laycock, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has helped write state religious freedom bills and supported the ones that foundered in Indiana and Arkansas. But in an article last year, he issued a warning to evangelical leaders. ‘‘It is a risky step to interfere with the most intimate details of other people’s lives while loudly claiming liberty for yourself,’’ Laycock wrote. ‘‘If you stand in the way of a revolution and lose, there will be consequences.’’

Refusing to serve customers has an ugly history. A half-century ago, the civil rights movement held lunch-counter sit-ins to protest Jim Crow. No one succeeded then in claiming a God-given right to refuse to serve black customers. Throughout the South, businesses open to the public became open to all. Today, in the name of religious liberty, there is robust Southern opposition to same-sex marriage. But supporters say the analogy to the exclusions of Jim Crow is inapt, because racial segregation was never central to Christian teaching the way traditional marriage has been. They also correctly point out that strong national laws protect against discrimination on the basis of race, but not against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In many states, in the South and elsewhere, a business or a landlord doesn’t need a special faith-based reason for turning away a gay client or tenant. They’re simply free to do so.

Given the speed with which public support for same-sex marriage is growing, gay people may win other rights against discrimination. But what about private religious schools and social-service organizations? ‘‘Hard questions’’ will arise, Chief Justice John Roberts predicted in his dissent from the same-sex marriage ruling, when, ‘‘for example, a religious college provides married student housing only to opposite-sex married couples, or a religious adoption agency declines to place children with same-sex couples.’’

In the Senate and the House of Representatives, dozens of Republicans quickly signed on to a bill that would protect the tax-exempt status of a religious organization in such a situation and prevent any government action against a business that refused to serve a gay couple. On both sides of this fight, tolerance no longer seems to be the word of the day. ‘‘The religious resisters say, ‘It doesn’t matter if you can have the wedding you want, because you shouldn’t be getting married anyway,’ ’’ Laycock said over the phone last week. ‘‘The gay rights people answer, ‘It doesn’t matter if you violate your conscience, because you’re just talking to your imaginary friend.’ ’’ When basic values and rights collide, usually somebody wins and somebody loses. It becomes difficult to find mutual compassion, even if that would be the godly thing to do.

[Elok]

I'm kind of exhausted by this argument, TBH.  If you haven't seen what I'm getting at thus far, I don't see anything else I can say, beyond: requiring a business owner to provide a non-vital service contrary to conscience, with no measurable damages done by refusal, is in effect to say that the rights to freedom of belief and expression may be superseded if said expression causes nothing but unquantifiable emotional distress.  This is the most trivial grounds for overruling possible, short of doing it arbitrarily for funsies.  It is to say, first, that the state has the right to intervene selectively based on perceived merits of individual beliefs rather than the neutral weighting of the needs of society as a whole, and second that freedom of conscience exists at the pleasure of the state in general.  This is a very bad precedent to set, especially over something as trivial as flowers and cake.

[Buster's Uncle]

I think I am going to have to bring up some extreme case hypotheticals, then.  Too sleepy right now, though...

[Rusty Edge]

Okay, I'm up to speed on the thread, having re-read the whole thing.

I'm kind of exhausted by this argument, TBH.  If you haven't seen what I'm getting at thus far, I don't see anything else I can say, beyond: requiring a business owner to provide a non-vital service contrary to conscience, with no measurable damages done by refusal, is in effect to say that the rights to freedom of belief and expression may be superseded if said expression causes nothing but unquantifiable emotional distress.  This is the most trivial grounds for overruling possible, short of doing it arbitrarily for funsies.  It is to say, first, that the state has the right to intervene selectively based on perceived merits of individual beliefs rather than the neutral weighting of the needs of society as a whole, and second that freedom of conscience exists at the pleasure of the state in general.  This is a very bad precedent to set, especially over something as trivial as flowers and cake.

1) Gayness. I think it's most likely a result of the effect of hormones and hormone imbalances on brain development during stress pregnancies. So prenatal environmental rather than genetic/evolutionary.
Something like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_spectrum_disorder

2) Church Lady with a florist business.
A) I think the discrimination suit should only apply to her business, not her, personally. That's the big one.
B) I think that being open to the public for business is different than your home. For example- I should be required to feed everybody who can pay at my restaurant, but not in my home. I should be able to write my own menu, but I don't get to decide who gets to order which food.
C) So I think the judge was right to tell her that if she doesn't want to serve gay weddings, she should drop all wedding services.
D) In this case I think there is more room to bend. Assuming ( I get these impressions about the case) a) She is not a monopoly: there's another Florist within 5 miles, b) She is a small family business, which I define as  she and her family employees are not outnumbered by non-family employees,  and as such her personal beliefs are those of the business -  then her mental anguish and that of the gay couple are "canceled out" and the judge should throw out the case.

3) Bake the cake and give them a tube of icing so that they can write on it themselves if they or their inscription offends you. See also #2.

4) I take your point Elok, about this being a backlash to the government using coercion in telling people what or how to think. Sometimes they feel forced to make a stand, and better sooner than later.

5) I think Christians would have a lot better time of it if we all prioritized things Christ is quoted as saying, such as  - Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, & love your neighbor as yourself. -  instead of bits of the Old Testament.

6) Or if instead of refusing him she had simply testified that she thought her customer would be imperiling his immortal soul with such a ceremony, he might have looked elsewhere.

[Elok]

Oh, there are probably ways to fight this, starting with a sign that says "I will donate all proceeds from gay wedding cakes--before cost of ingredients and labor--to an anti-gay lobbying group."  At present I think they're still proceeding under the assumption that it's possible to remain even remotely respectable members of society instead of an utterly reviled sub-caste.

I can't think of any circumstance where it makes sense for the government to rule on anybody's "mental anguish" as such.  Such things are by nature vague and impossible to measure, as well as being the most evanescent type of damage.  Lost money, physical injury, a drop in sales, property damage, doctored nudie photos of you with a monkey on the internet--whatever, it's all legit.  It's when you get the state trying to rule on whose feelings were more greatly offended that you've entered the hazy realm of the absurd.  That's utterly subjective, and there's no ceiling on it.

#5 is a POV that would make sense if they prioritized being liked over having what they considered the correct beliefs.  I don't think they do, but that's beside the point.  The First Amendment exists to protect unpopular beliefs: Quakers and Catholics years ago, Mormons and peyote-using Indians today.

[Buster's Uncle]

It's interesting that you're so adamant on this.  -Not to be an innerwebs nurd arguing, but I think the point I made at the top of this page about sundry modes of marriage -a religious point, not a legal one, the religious angle being an own-goal, legally, on the face of it- is worth consideration, and I'd be interested in seeing it addressed...


Strikes me that if I was the Washington Attorney General, I'd call up the ACLU and ask them to step off, observing that I wasn't inclined to continue any official action unless the private legal harassment stopped.  I do completely agree that it's all too much and wrong to ruin this poor woman so thoroughly over this.  -That's different than thinking society's interest in forbidding discrimination isn't a profound one, and arguments to the contrary are a bit Rat Sorbet...

[Elok]

My point is that *this is not discrimination*, at least not in any relevant sense.  The objection is clearly not to serving gay customers in general, but in providing a very specific service which implies participation in a morally objectionable activity.

That gay marriage is a part of gay identity is, to me, not relevant--the two are not identical, and there is no indication that these businesses would refrain from offering gay patrons any other service (nor are they asking for that right).

That this bears a superficial resemblance to Jim Crow is not relevant, as there are more than enough differences between the two to render that resemblance meaningless.  A customer from a disadvantaged demographic group goes into a store, is declined service.  The truthful similarities, without equivocation, begin and end there.  The cynical mining of a dark time in American history to beat down the losing side in a culture war spat disgusts me.

That the store owners' beliefs may appear inconsistent or nonsensical is not relevant; we apply that test to no other religious or expressive exemption.  The only relevant factor is the degree to which the claimed exemption would inconvenience others--hence we allow religious groups to do any number of bizarre things, but draw the line at handling poison snakes.  Because handling poison snakes could hurt people; the fact that it's a daft thing to do (and based entirely on an over-literal interpretation of one line from Mark) is of no importance.  That is simply not how our Constitutional rights work.

That their behavior may appear or be construed as hateful is irrelevant; there's no chance on earth that a crucifix submerged in pee was not intended purely to offend and disgust, but we still recognize that, as artistic expression, it occupies a privileged space which we will respect and defend regardless.

I am adamant about this because it is bullying disguised as protecting the powerless, wrapped in bad logic and pushed hardest by people who despise me just as much as these misguided (and thoroughly harmless) shopkeepers.  And because it represents yet another push away from individual liberty and towards the custodial state, which now grants itself the power to regulate utterly intangible, hence immeasurable and unfalsifiable, offenses.  And it's progressives--I refuse to call them liberal any longer--pushing it.

[Rusty Edge]

Oh, I forgot to make a comment on the premise of the thread. The common sense approach to the thread premise is simply to raise the penalties for committing crimes in public restrooms, whatever they are. That deterrent helps protect everyone.