George Will Is Wrong about Masterpiece Cakeshop: The Right NOT to Promote a Message is Protected

National Review ^ | 12/05/2017 | David French

[Grampa Dave]

“Sounds like we’re going to have to get some people to run around San Francisco asking businesses to bake Confederate flag and swastika cakes.”

Even worse for them, we can ask for cakes honoring President Trump’s successful first year.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

In fact this is not the first "theme cake" he has refused to make. He has also refused to make Halloween cakes for example.

Everyone has the right to refuse to work for someone. You do not lose that right when you start a business.

[Mears]

I guarantee that these men were delighted when the baker turned them down———they WANTED this to happen so they could publicize it-————and make waves for their “cause”.

.

.

[DoodleDawg]

Everyone has the right to refuse to work for someone. You do not lose that right when you start a business.

That's what this court case will decide.

[DoodleDawg]

Sounds like we’re going to have to get some people to run around San Francisco asking businesses to bake Confederate flag and swastika cakes.

Rebels and Nazis are not protected classes.

[DoodleDawg]

But design and the skill to decorate a cake beautifully = artistic expression.

Suppose the customer came in and gave specific instructions on exactly how they wanted the cake to look. Doesn't that take the artistic expression away from the baker and gives it to the customer?

That's why I think this case should have been fought on freedom of religion grounds and not freedom of expression.

[bunkerhill7]

viz,

If a heterosexual comes into a Christian bakery and asks for a “wedding cake” for two homosexual friends, the baker should tell him:
“Tell your mother to bake you a queer cake coz she knows how to make queer things in her oven.”

[Grampa Dave]

George need to take a sabbatical and go away into some wilderness and not come back until President Trump has finished his second term.

Then, he would have to have two vows:

1. Never write anything!
2. A vow of silence for the rest of his life!

In the meantime, George take a hike and tell your lies to the DC swamp people, you slither around with.

[TBP]

Suppose a baker or a printer is gay and is asked to provide services for an event promoting traditional marriage. Is it OK for that baker or printer to say no?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

No, the courts will not decide if you have the right to refuse to work for someone.

You have that right.

They might uphold it or not but they can not change the reality.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Will is a self-described “amiable, low voltage atheist.”

Which now sounds an awful lot like “moderate Muslim”, as far as his tolerance of other religions goes.

[DoodleDawg]

No, the courts will not decide if you have the right to refuse to work for someone.

You have that right.

Not currently. That's what this court case is all about.

[catpuppy]

The plaintiffs wanted a custom wedding cake design that celebrated their gay wedding. The defendant wanted to abide by his religious belief that homosexuality is sinful.

The questions that the court should answer are these: Would the gay couple suffer harm by obtaining their cake elsewhere from a baker willing to provide it? The answer is no.

Would a baker who is forced to make a cake for a ceremony that violates his religious beliefs be harmed by doing so? The answer is yes.

There are numerous sources for wedding cakes. But an individual only has one conscience and there is no available substitute.

[Boogieman]

Conservatives (or any political affiliation) are not a “protected class”, so legally anyone or any business can discriminate against them at will. So the conflict that you cite as basis for removing 1st amendment rights from businesses doesn’t actually exist.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

You always have that right.

Now they may infringe on that right but you still have that right.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

The question should be, just because someone offers you money to do something are you obliged to do it?

If I do yard work and the Church of Satan wants me to do theirs am I obliged to do so?

Then we are wage slaves not free citizens and it is time to cut the ties that binds and gag.

[DoodleDawg]

You always have that right.

Now they may infringe on that right but you still have that right.

You have the right not to go into business, too.

[Yosemitest]

George Will is a DemocRAT who got SO OFFENDED by the DemocRATS, that he couldn't tolerate being associated with all those "CRAZIES" .
Now for a deeper understanding of just WHO George Will IS:

The word "neocons" is ONLY used by LIBERALS, trying to insult Conservatives.
The is no such thing as a "NEW" Conservative.
Conservatives ARE Conservative, plain and simple.

But read this"
Liberals, Conservatives, and Neocons — Learn the Difference!
March 12, 2014

Almost everybody is confused about the word "neoconservative" and its shortened form, "neocon."
I find that liberals/Democrats seem to use it as a sort of disrespectful form of "conservative,"
and probably have no idea the the words have distinct meanings.
On the other hand, I know of some conservatives who define it as "new conservatives,"
meaning people who were formerly something else, but have converted to conservatism.
Both are wrong.
As near as I can tell, "neo-" doesn't apply to any other word that way —
formerly not X, but having become X.
No, "neo-" almost always refers to an ideology that is different from the root word in a significant way.
Neoconfederates are not people who want to secede and become a separate country.
They want the ideals of the Confederacy to be applied to modern politics, more or less, but not all of them.
Neoliberal is a more vague term,
but it specifically applies to people who may have SOME of the attributes of liberals,
but who contradict liberalism in their advocacy of free trade and privatization
and other ideas usually thought of as conservative.
And, finally, neoconservatives are mostly those moderate cold war LIBERALS who defected to the Republican party when the Democrats got totally flaky with McGovern and his ilk.
Their ultimate origin, however, is not the Democratic party but the Trotskyite movement.



Jack Kerwick elaborates.

Read this:
Most "Conservatives" Are Secretly Neoconservatives
12 March, 2014, by Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

A colleague of mine has drawn my attention to a Washington Post blog post — “Why Most Conservatives Are Secretly Liberals” — by a Professor John Sides, a political scientist at Georgetown University.

Sides agrees with fellow political scientists Christopher Ellis and James Stimson, co-authors of Ideology in America.
Ellis and Stimson CONTEND that
America is, at bottom, a “center-left nation,”
for while “30 percent” of self-described “liberals” are consistent in endorsing “liberal” policy prescriptions,
the same sort of consistency can be ascribed to only “15 percent” of “conservatives.”
And another “30 percent” of “conservatives” actually advance “liberal” positions.

In short, Americans may TALK the talk of “conservatism,” but they WALK the walk of “liberalism.”
That is, they favor Big Government.

Sides, Ellis, and Stimson, it seems clear to me, are “liberals.”
It doesn’t require much reading between the lines to discern this.
That they associate “liberals,” and “liberals” ALONE, with such virtues as “consistency” and such lofty ideals as “a cleaner environment” and “a stronger safety net” is enough to bear this out.
Yet in peddling the ridiculous, patently absurd notion that
“conservatives” see the media as PROMOTING “conservatism,”
the verdict regarding their “liberalism” is seen for the NO-BRAINER that it is.

There is, though, another CLUE that unveils Sides’, Ellis’, and Stimson’s ideological PREJUDICES:
They equate the term “liberalism” with a robust affirmation of Big Government.
They treat “liberalism” synonymously with its modern, “Welfare-Statist” incarnation.
There is no mention here of the fact that, originally, “liberalism” referred to
a vision that attached supreme value to individual liberty,
a vision in which government played, and had to play, a minimal role in the lives of its citizens.
And there is no mention of the fact that, if “liberalism” is now “an ugly word,”
it is because the very same socialists who made “socialism” an ugly word hijacked “liberalism” when it enjoyed a favorable reception
and visited upon it the same fate that they secured for “socialism.”

In other words, if Sides himself wanted to be bluntly honest, he’d have to admit that “liberals” are secretly socialists.

Still, though their premises are bogus, Sides and his colleagues draw the correct conclusion that
most “conservatives” are NOTHING OF THE KIND.
The truth of the matter is that
the vast majority of contemporary “conservatives” are neoconservatives.

Now, “neoconservatism” is a term that hasn’t the best reputation.
It has ALWAYS BEEN CONTROVERSIAL,
and most of its proponents have DISAVOWED IT to the point of, preposterously, condemning it as an “anti-Semitic” SLUR.
But George W. Bush and his party inflicted potentially irrevocable damage upon the label.
“Conservatism” is a more marketable label.

Nevertheless, the reality is that neoconservatism is indeed a distinct school of political thought.
Beyond this, it is fundamentally different in kind from classical conservatism.
Irving Kristol, the so-called “Godfather” of neoconservatism, an appellation that he readily endorsed, ADMITS this in noting both
that neoconservatism exists
and that “conservative” “can be misleading” when used to describe it.

Neoconservatism, you see, is THE INVENTION OF LEFTISTS like Kristol himself.
When the Democratic Party began veering too far to the Left in the 1960s, Kristol and more moderate leftists began turning toward the Republican Party.
So as TO DISTINGUISH THEMSELVES FROM traditional conservatives, they coined the term “neoconservatism.”

Neoconservatives, Kristol asserts, are “not at all hostile to the idea of a welfare state” —
even if they reject the “vast and energetic bureaucracies” created by the Great Society.
Neoconservatives ENDORSE “social security, unemployment insurance,” and “some kind of family assistance plan,” among other measures.
But what’s most interesting, particularly at a time when ObamaCare has DIVIDED the country, is that Kristol reminds us that
neoconservatives SUPPORT “some form of national health insurance.”

In all truthfulness, however, neither a degree in political science nor an IQ above four is required to know that
neoconservatism has always championed Big Government
for it is its foreign policy vision more than anything else that distinguishes it from its competitors.
For neoconservatives, America is “exceptional” in being, as Kristol puts it, “a creedal nation,”
the only nation in all of human history to have been founded upon an “ideology” of equality, of “natural rights.”
The U.S.A., then, has a responsibility to promote this ideology throughout the world.

And it is by way of a potentially boundless military — i.e. Big Government — that this “ideological patriotism” is to be executed.

Had the foregoing political scientists been looking in the right places, they would BE FORCED TO CONCLUDE that most “conservatives” are secretly neoconservatives.

So, you see that those WHO THEY CALL "neoconservatives", are really nothing more than the old moderate side of the DemocRATS.
It's just THAT SIMPLE .

[Political Junkie Too]

Rebels and Nazis are not protected classes. 

Here is an interesting thought exercise:

At what point do "protected class" laws become a bill of attainder? In other words, if the application of "protected class" becomes such that, in effect, everyone EXCEPT Christian white males becomes protected by law, then is that law unconstitutional?

Or, are you using the term "protected" to mean privileged by society?

-PJ

[Anima Mundi]

I don’t think so because there is skill and artistry involved in mixing the colors and making the whole design work spatially and otherwise. I have tried to make those little flowers from icing and it is hard to get one to look like a flower, much like an artist knows just how to draw so that something appears dimensional and real using shading, etc. Besides, look at what they have deemed as “art”, ie. a cross placed in a jar of urine, so the standard for what is “art” seems extremely wide. There are many ways to look at this I guess.