RE: Supreme Court Rules In Favor Of Colorado Baker
June 11, 2018 at 1:05 pm
(This post was last modified: June 11, 2018 at 1:15 pm by johan.)
(June 11, 2018 at 11:11 am)Clueless Morgan Wrote:Quote:A more interesting question is this. Suppose when the gay couple approached this baker he had instead told them that he'd be willing to bake them a wedding cake but since he didn't personally agree with gay marriage, he did not expect that the resulting cake would be his best work. IOW, I'll make it for you and sell it to you, but I won't do a very good job and you're probably not going to like it. Still illegal then?
That is an interesting question. I suppose if this baker is proven to consistently provide substandard cakes to gay customers (and by substandard I mean with respect to comparable cakes made for straight customers) then I think a legal case for discrimination could be made.
Would it not be similar to a baker who consistently provides substandard cakes to African Americans?
How would one prove in a legal sense and beyond a reasonable doubt that their cake was substandard? And how would one realistically be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that all cakes prepared for [insert group] were substandard while all cakes prepared for everyone else were not substandard?
Let's go even further and take the cake itself out of the equation. Lets say the cakes themselves are baked identically and taste identical. But the decorating is different. Since decoration on every cake is a one-off custom creation, how would one prove in a legal sense that the baker purposely didn't do as good of a job on their cake because of their sexual orientation?
Seems to me that would nearly impossible to prove. So much so that any discrimination law on the subject would be all but unenforceable in those cases. What you didn't like my decorating? Well that was the best I could do with the time I had available. But since you don't like it, you don't have to buy the cake. You're free to go have some other bakery make you a better one. Have a nice day. Seems hard to imagine you could prove discrimination in that situation.