Comments on: New York Times on bake-my-cake cases https://www.overlawyered.com/2014/12/new-york-times-bake-cake-cases/ Chronicling the high cost of our legal system Sun, 21 Dec 2014 23:31:09 +0000 hourly 1 By: L. C. Burgundy https://www.overlawyered.com/2014/12/new-york-times-bake-cake-cases/comment-page-1/#comment-315585 Sun, 21 Dec 2014 23:31:09 +0000 http://overlawyered.com/?p=50274#comment-315585 I’ve always figured that the business owners who get tangled up in these cases are none too bright and/or secretly do want the publicity. It’s pretty easy to legally get rid of people you don’t want to serve in the kind of arranged-in-advance business that weddings are. Once people hear you don’t WANT to serve them on their wedding day (but you will, only after you say you think they’re bad people and you’re doing this only to avoid violating the law), they’ll go away. They might speak badly about you, but them’s the breaks of refusing customers. Secondarily, threats to donate to political enemies will almost always certainly work in ridding yourself of a customer.

That said, I find the kind of morality Mr. Phillips professes to practice by refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding to be utterly self-serving, morally shallow, and silly. First, vendors are vendors. They are not endorsing anything, and no one cares what they think about any given event. I’m sure Mr. Phillips has baked cakes for second or later marriages of divorcees before – and as a Southern Baptists, he KNOWS Jesus Christ actually did condemn such remarriages quite explicitly. Marriages are public record, so he could always verify his customers have never been married – but I sit here pretty sure he never did that. And I cannot see how he could engage in cake baking for any non-Christian religious denomination’s celebration of any sort lest he risk celebrating or endorsing blasphemy against the Lord. The reality is that he is practicing a very shallow, surface appearance form of morality based on how things sort-of kind-of look.

Photographers are a closer call (they at least are making expressive art, not people who mix a couple of commodities together), but it’s even easier to get rid of an unwanted customer for them, because people really don’t want a photographer that disapproves of what they’re photographing.

Finally, I think this goes to show how self-absorbed wedding cake bakers are. Sorry, but they are. Personal experience speaking here. They are glorified line cooks at best, not moral arbiters.

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