"a weapon to oppress anyone who dissents from _today's_ politically-correct rules"

Every age has had it own rules, formal and informal, concerning what is politically correct. In the past, censorship and blasphemy laws were used as weapons to uphold those rules.

The more important point about this situation is the lack of forethought by both the plaintiffs in this case, and also those Christians in the US who have picked up religious freedom laws, extended them, and are now using them as a weapon, just like the gays in this case.

There is a clear difference between being free to speak or express oneself and being forced to speak. Witness the outrage over Colin Kaepernick's refusal to stand during the anthem at a football game. Oddly, many of those who support the bakers here are the most outraged by his refusal.

The misuse and abuse of the religious freedom decision by SCoTUS is going to descend into farce. Satanist groups are now suing run after school programs. What of the inevitable Xtian outrage when a Muslim shop assistant refuses to handle alcohol or bacon, or her taxi driver brother who refuses to carry guide dogs? The potential for such laws to tear at the civility that allows everyday life is enormous.

The county clerk who made headlines by refusing to issue marriage applications to gays, in a state that allowed SSM is another example. She has been divorced and married three or so times. Imagine the outrage from her should a traditionalist Catholic shopkeeper refuse to serve her on the basis that divorce and remarriage offend his religious views.

Having a right is one thing. Insisting upon asserting it in all situations is foolish, as anyone who drives will know.

Maybe this all of nothing approach to life is part of the general decrease in empathy which has been noted by researchers. Not everything is neat, ambiguity is common, other people exist, and sometimes their rights clash. We seem to be getting worse at dealing with this.

I, like many in my vicinity, are way past the moment in time, when the comfort zones of the " strange among us" matter, or even deserve a second thought.
If I were the baker though, I would be tempted to put the cake in the homosexuals "love hole"!

Brendan, so you're arguing that people should be able to discriminate on whatever basis they like?

Sex, Skin color, religion, marital status? sexual orientation, age?

What is it all of the above some of the above or none of the above?

I've not followed the legal aspects of this case but do have some views on the overall topic.

My understanding is that the baker accepted the order in the first place and that it was technical difficulties that caused the failure to fulfil the order. If they did not want the order it should not have been accepted. If that's an issue of staff training that's the bakers problem not the problem of the people placing the order.

In this instance if the order was accepted it should have been fulfilled and the if the business owners did not want further orders some appropriate notices to make their stance clear to customers and staff training were the appropriate response.

I do though think that no one should be forced to provide a service not already agreed to that goes against personal beliefs if where they don't receive government support to provide that service and are willing to accept the logical consequences
- If the Government was restricting competition in an area to help the viability of business and therefore limiting alternatives for the customer then options to refuse service should be diminished.
- If you are employed to do a job that the employer is willing to accept then the option is to do the job or leave the job.

R0bert

I'm sure there a team of queers traveling around looking for Christian bakeries just to start trouble with, so they can scream 'discrimination' and be portrayed as helpless victims.
They're deliberately messing with other peoples lives for no good reason.
The victims are the bakers, their lives and businesses affected by attention seeking miscreants.

Political correctness is tyranny under another name. People in a bakery, or any other private business, do not have to sell anything to anyone if they don't wish too. They might lose other business over their refusal, and they might receive abuse from the Left (the only section of society wanting enslave everybody) but they should be able to refuse service to poofters, black people, white people, left handers, Presbyterians, and so on, if they wish to do so. What problems this attitude causes for them is their problem only. For the law to stick its nose in and tell who they can and cannot serve is a travesty. Ireland has shown itself, again, to be a hick country with a nasty, authoritarian streak.

The author writes: “I also wonder what the attitude of the PC brigade would be, if an Islamic owner of a bakery refused to ice an image of Muhammad on a cake.”

I don’t think this analogy works. Refusing to ice an image of Muhammad doesn’t say anything (offensive or otherwise) about the people requesting it. It is not a form of discrimination that attacks who the people, making such a strange request, are.

Similar analogies, like asking if the “PC brigade” would object to bakers refusing to ice a swastika for neo-Nazis, also don’t work because what the swastika represents is demonstrably harmful (not just an imagined affront to a non-existent being), and does not attack who a person was born as, but who they choose to be.

That being said, I’m still cautious about implementing legal mechanisms to prevent bigots exercising their intolerance when they have risked so much in starting up their own business. Furthermore, through the internet and social media, we now have an informal mechanism in place that would ensure such bigots lose business through boycotts.

If, however, their business has received tax payer money, then they would have no right to discriminate against a same-sex couples and I would feel no sympathy for them.

This is not about discrimination. Anti-discrimination laws were never meant to protect rights to a cake. It goes against the very nature of the law and it is a slap in the face to those who fought long and hard for the end to discrimination. It makes a mockery of such laws.

Being jailed for homosexuality is discrimination. Not getting the cake you want is not the same thing. It says a lot about the values of these complainants who went to all this trouble. They are petty individuals who need to use the law to bully and intimidate others over trivial issues.

Every one of us gets discriminated against every day for a host of reasons. Not all of us can retaliate by abusing a law which had much more humanity than this as its validation. Nor would most of us want to if we could.

You are all getting confused.

You can talk about what you'd like the law to be, or you can talk about whether people should have the right to use the law to uphold their rights within the law.

It seems some of you are suggesting that the law is wrong, and that's your right. However to suggest someone is wrong for upholding their right under the law is just crazy.

"However to suggest someone is wrong for upholding their right under the law is just crazy."

Laws are often much broader than the situations where they should be applied, if not then the genuinely guilty escape too easily via the fine print.

There are those who take the view that if you can get away with it then it's OK.

People can certainly be wrong for upholding a right under the law if doing so takes advantage of broadly framed laws in a way that hurts others unreasonably. Just as where free speech is free the person using that freedom to hurt others can be wrong the person using anti-discrimination laws to hurt others can be wrong.

R0bert

Cobber:

The law is not wrong but there is something very wrong with people who would pursue it to this extent over a cake. It probably cost taxpayers thousands of dollars in legal costs to hear there case. What values do they have when so much more good could be done with that money? What is important to them?

The law is neither right nor wrong but that does not mean we are not entitled to pass judgement on the values of these complainants. The law is not the only thing that society values. It also values treating others with appropriate response to a perceived wrongdoing. It values not wasting taxpayer dollars. It also values letting others have their beliefs and act upon them when they do not impinge on your own rights to any great extent.

The onus is not on them to prove to the court that they were discriminated against. The onus is on them to prove to the rest of society that a cake is so important and we should judge their values accordingly.

Not everything in society should be subject to legal values.

There are bad laws, Section 18C, for instance - such a tyrannical law against free speech, that any freedom-loving democrat might want to disobey.,The Left totalitarians who object to draconian discrimination laws being flouted, need to remember that another very bad law- conscription for death in Vietnam for some - was flouted by many young men at the urging of the very Left premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan, along with the Marxist, Jim Cairns. People who ignore history will always be caught out in their sanctimonious blathering.

This case has already been tried, both in the courtroom and the court of public opinion, where the bakery proprietors lost?

If there was a problem the couples money should have been refused!

Given it wasn't there and then, for the purpose of the law a contract had been entered into! End of story!

It seems that other customers were offended and threw down a homophobic gauntlet? Their custom or ours?

And the reason for the change of heart and subsequent appeal? No amount of shutting the door after the horse has bolted ,will alter the fact, that this horse has gone! Along with a significant percentage of that Belfast Bakery's former business? Hence the historical revision and attempted PW (blame the victim) weasel word justification? The hypocrisy is all yours Sir.
Alan B.

If a bakery made it clear that its proprietors were gay -- or religious fanatics -- as part of its normal business communications, then as a matter of ordinary courtesy I wouldn't ask them to create a product with a message that they would find offensive. I would simply find another bakery.

But I'm not aware of any bakeries that do advertise themselves as 'gay' or 'Christian'; and if a bakery merely advertises itself as a bakery, I have a right to expect they will deliver any product I order that is within their capabilities and within the law.

If the author can find a bakery where the proprietors are not only gay, but make that known as an integral part of their marketing, and if he is insensitive enough to ask that bakery to produce a product with a message expressing religious bigotry, then I would expect them to do it.

But I would be a little concerned about what ingredients they might use in the recipe.

Meanwhile back on the streets of Belfast, Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth some 14yr old kid is dying from lack of sustenance and shelter...where are the priorities today ? The whole LGBTI - Land Rights for Left Handed Lesbian Harp Seals crew should take a good long hard look in the mirror and put their minds at rest.

Hypocrisy, travesty, whatever descriptive expletive you choose to use, please just get this farce over and done with and stop spending taxpayers money on this doughnut without a hole and crap flavoured icing on it.

Superfluous, 'panem et circenses' and completely unnecessary.

Top Five invention for all time

Despite the fact that some people are fortunate enough to discover the “next” penicillin, most inventions come from those who’ve devoted their lives, or at least a noteworthy portion of them, to understanding and expertise in a specific field. As you’ll see in the following list, the top 5 creations of all time are no coincidence.


The Internet
Invented in 1969 (and not by Al Gore), the World Wide Web grew from just four users in 1969 to 50,000 in 1988. From there, a million in 1991 and more than 500 million by 2001. Today there are over 1.2 billion people (roughly 19 percent of the world) connected online. And whether it’s used for social media, shopping or to find information, the Internet has forever changed the landscape of the world, arguably making it considerably smaller in the process.
The Barcode
First invented by a student in the early 1950s, barcodes were originally envisioned to deliver a kind of visual Morse code. Stores were initially slow to accept the technology, which at the time was somewhat untrustworthy. But that changed in the early 1970s when the same student, Norman Woodland, planned the Universal Product Code while working for IBM. Since then, the familiar black stripes have seemed on everything from orange juice to a pair of stylish sunglasses, transforming sales and inventory management in the space of less than one square inch.
Internal Combustion Engine



LASER

LASER – short for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation – is used in everything from home blu ray players to forward-thinking weaponry. Albert Einstein was the first one to pledge its development in 1917 when he planned that atoms could be enthused to emit photons in a single direction. Three decades later, this phenomenon was first observed. And in 1960, Theodore Maiman, a physicist, who built the first working laser. Maiman’s laser was built around a ruby crystal that was said to emit light “brighter than the centre of the sun.

omg - so totally over it.

Pureclassic1111, sorry can't let this go.
The barcode was invented by US railways to sort out freight cars in
hump freight yards. Each car had a bar code on its side and was read
as the car passed and the points were then operated so the car rolled
to join the train being made up for a particular destination.

I think it has now been replaced by number reading software that reads
the number of the car, looks up the computer and sets the track accordingly.

Nothing is ever new is it ?

Purclassic 1111, correction,
You were right about the student inventing it but it was in the 1930s.
The US railways adopted a similar system in the 1960s.
RFID techniques have now replaced it.
With computers and data transmission a central computer can keep track
of where each car is located, its contents and its destination.

I think that case is so hyped without a reason. Stop it please...

Should someone be punished for NOT doing what ISN'T legal ? Sorry for all the negatives, try this: should someone be allowed to do what is legal ? Or compelled to do what isn't legal ?

Gay marriage is not yet legal. How can it be illegal, or punishable, for any baker NOT to make a cake recognising gay marriage when the law doesn't ?

So maybe we should postpone this discussion until gay marriage is actually legal, sometime in the distant future. Meanwhile, I'm much more concerned about the plight of fairy penguins, or land degradation or water pollution. Sorry, but that's just the environmentalist in me. Does anybody remember the environment ?

Joe