"trader_4" wrote in message news:82f87de9-
The bakery didn't refuse to bake cakes for gays.
I suspect you have that wrong as you did the "damages" being called "fines"
part of this case and the cease and desist order being called a "gag" order.
They served the gay couple wanting the cake in the past.
I believe they served non-gay relations of the couple in the past. The
whole affair "blew up" when the cake baker taking the order asked for the
name of the husband. I'd love to see a credible source for your claim
because it neither has the ring of truth to it nor does it match with what's
in the document that details BOLIs actions.
http://m.snopes.com/2015/07/03/sweet...lissa-damages/
http://www.oregon.gov/boli/SiteAsset...Cakes%20FO.pdf
They refused to bake a wedding cake for them.
That I will agree with because that's the specific violation of state law
that landed them in the hot water they're in. Key words being "violation of
law." And now, since the religious Right has clearly lost the battle in the
gay marriage law, is looking for a way to end-run that decision. Hence the
"closely held" religious BS. Just like the hypocrites of Hobby Lobby who
said they couldn't possibly have anything to do with paying for
contraception but somehow aren't reluctant to take money made from investing
in birth control makers.
Sheer hypocrisy. Hiding behind the respect most people in the US have for
the religion of their fellow Americans is reprehensible, especially when
using it to advance a very dubious agenda. If it hurts SO much to pay for
contraception, why is making money from the sale of it to others "fair game"
for Hobby Lobby?
I don't pretend to know what Jesus would or would not do.
Gee, why not? Everyone else here (including me) has ventured some opinion
as to what Jesus would do. That's not unusual considering the question
"What would Jesus do?" is obviously one that's asked often.
As I understand it, Jesus had high moral standards
and since according to the bible homosexuality is a sin, baking a
cake for a gay wedding sounds like something he might not want to
participate in.
One sentence ago you say you "won't pretend" to know but it *sounds* like
you're "pretending to know what Jesus would do" now - doesn't it? As
someone here is fond of writing: good grief!
Prostitution is also a sin, but Jesus clearly had no fear of interacting
with such people. How is ANYONE expected to guide someone to the light if
they're afraid to be in the same room with them? It makes no sense. You
don't "catch gayness." So when people say they are following the teachings
of Jesus I say "that's doubtful." His teachings are rather compact - if you
eliminate all the follow-on interpretations and stick to words it's believed
he actually used. And his teachings are nearly universally inclusive, not
exclusive. "Turn the other cheek, do unto others, take the beam out of your
eye" - it's all there in very plain language.
If someone came to Jesus and wanted to rent a
room so that they could commit adultery, what would Jesus do?
Oh God, you tell us "I don't pretend to know what Jesus would do" and now
you have him as a hypothetical landlord of a hotsheet hotel. He'd more
likely say (and is on record as saying) "Judge not lest ye be judged."
Find more than a passing reference to homosexuality in the Gospels and
*maybe* I'll concede that Jesus had strong feelings against gays. It will
be a fruitless search, however. It isn't there.
See, this is the problem with libs and all the lib laws.
Here we go - everything wrong with the world in your eyes is because of
something "libs" do. sigh Yet you'll easily excuse Bush for dragging us
into two ten-year plus wars that solved nothing. And you protest mightily
if someone dare blame him for the economic mess two ten year wars brought
us. He may have had bad intel to start, but he stayed LONG after it was
determined the WMD intel was bad. So the bad intel argument you often make
to excuse his war-mongering collapses at that point. We gave him the go
ahead to find and destroy WMDs, but he enlarged his mission to the
preposterous one of trying to bring order to an orderless bunch of religious
zealots who've been killing each other over who loves Allah more for over
1000 years.
One could easily argue that our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan has
resulted in home-grown terrorists acting on their own (like the Boston
bomber) because they believe Islam is under attack by the US. Heckuva job,
as GW would say. We not only didn't solve the Muslim terrorist problem,
we've begun growing our own.
You wind up having to resort to figuring out what is in
people's minds and what Jesus would do. If you leave people
free to do as they please in their own business, you don't have
that problem.
Good gracious God almighty. The way you see things, there's never been any
gay bashing and all discrimination has stopped. What I don't understand is
how a person as smart as you are still believes so profoundly in free
markets. They have notorious failure points and 100 years after the Civil
War the free market had done nothing to end discrimination. In fact, it
institutionalized it in Jim Crow laws. It took Lyndon Johnson's Civil
Rights Act of 1964 to move toward a more fair nation.
Under a truly free market, workers have little/no leverage as its employers
who are able to pick and choose among workers much easier than workers can
pick and choose amongst employees. The free market fails to protect natural
resources and it failed to provide affordable health insurance to seniors,
giving rise to the birth of Medicare. If you remember, the "free market" of
auto manufacturers fought tooth and nail against standards that would clean
up the air, despite LA and many other cities drowning in smog. Not only did
the free market not help to clean the air, it actively fought making this
change that has been beneficial to nearly all members of society. But this
is a subject for another thread.
Or, for the most part, any other real problems.
That's why Nixon had to create the EPA, that's why we had to create a
Superfund to clean up toxic waste sites. How well does the free market,
left alone, keep companies from polluting the environment so much that
billions are required to clean up sites they poisoned? The sad truth is
that your faith in the free market is misplaced because time and again the
bad acts of companies that went bankrupt left taxpayers with the clean-up
bill.
The ultimate refutation of your quaint idea that people, when left alone,
will do the right thing is that there has never been such a society in the
history of the world. There probably never will be. People's
self-interests almost always interfere with altruism. Free market failures
(like the Great Depression) are almost always what cause regulations to come
into being. The US took a very serious swing towards socialism as the
result of the 1929 disaster - the free market run wild.
There were 1000 bakeries that would supply the cake.
But this one insisted on violating state law in Oregon. And they got caught
and punished. Sounds pretty biblical to me. If you want to open a bakery
to the public in Oregon, you have to obey state law. What a quaint idea.
Obeying the Bible is a voluntary choice, obeying the Constitution and law of
the land is not, although some people are trying to make it seem that way.
If a vendor feels the Bible prohibits themfrom interacting with gay people
in the public sphere, they had better go set up a religious commune where
they won't run into people who will disturb their precious sensibilities.
--
Bobby G.