Could a Catholic bake a cake for a gay wedding?

[Gorgias]

When two people devote themselves to the cause of love, who are we to judge?

So, here’s my question: does the “cause of love” include “confirming and supporting the beloved in his sins”? Or, does true love attempt to lift the beloved up and away from sin?

What Jesus did not do … was throw the first stone, nor did he stand idly by while others mistreated an adulterer.

Did he tell her “go and commit more adultery”?

I cannot recall an instance when Jesus spoke against gay love, he was quite clear about adultery

Ahh, but Jesus spoke against fornication, didn’t he?

 

[StephenButler]

I have yet to see a sin-free marriage. Still, it is a cause of love.

 

[StephenButler]

Do Catholic bakers check to make sure it is a first wedding?
Check annulment papers if it is not?
Check to make sure it is a Catholic wedding?

No to all. The bakers who are issuing this complaint are not doing so because they will only support a sin-free wedding. They are doing it because they are prejudiced against gay people and want to shun them.

If you do business with the secular public, you have a responsibility to Caesar to do business with the entire public. Picking and choosing sins from among customers in order to shun them is a disservice to the society which supports your business. If you want public profit rather than “I only serve Catholics” profit, then give Caesar his due.

 

[Gorgias]

I have yet to see a sin-free marriage. Still, it is a cause of love.

Nice deflection, but that wasn’t the question. It wasn’t whether spouses sin, but whether the marriage is the cause of the sin of the spouses. (After all, that’s the whole reason that civilly married couples aren’t permitted to receive the Eucharist, right… because their marriage is the context for unrepented sin!)

 

[Gorgias]

The bakers who are issuing this complaint are not doing so because they will only support a sin-free wedding. They are doing it because they are prejudiced against gay people and want to shun them.

If you do business with the secular public, you have a responsibility to Caesar to do business with the entire public.

I think you’re spot-on with your second assertion, but missing the point in your first. If a person were asked to bake a cake to celebrate a murder and said ‘no’, would that be a “prejudice” against the murderer, or an expression of the baker’s rejection of the morality of the act being celebrated?

 

[StephenButler]

Murderers are not a protected minority in secular society.

Homosexuality is.

When you do secular business, secular morality makes the rules.

 

[StephenButler]

Catholics bake cakes for second and third weddings too; they don’t ask if they are church-approved before they do

You cherry picked my post.

Apply your logic to this: “Catholics bake cakes for second and third weddings too; they don’t ask if they are church-approved before they do”

The bakers are cherry picking sins. They are not refusing to bake cakes they morally object to. They are refusing gay people in particular. Adultery is evidently fine.

 

[Gorgias]

Apply your logic to this: “Catholics bake cakes for second and third weddings too; they don’t ask if they are church-approved before they do”

The bakers are cherry picking sins. They are not refusing to bake cakes they morally object to. They are refusing gay people in particular. Adultery is evidently fine.

Not cherry picking. Not on my part, and not on the part of the bakers.

Here’s the thing: bakers are generally not asking anyone “is this a celebration of a sinful union?” However, if the couple is volunteering that info, then the baker is made aware of it. (Intrinsically, by identifying the couple in a same-sex wedding, that couple is identifying the event as such.)

 

[Gorgias]

Murderers are not a protected minority in secular society.

Homosexuality is.

When you do secular business, secular morality makes the rules.

That’s why there are two distinct questions being conflated here:

• civil rights vis-a-vis anti-discrimination laws
• rights of citizens to avoid being forced to act against their religious beliefs. (The claim is that support of a same-sex wedding is an act that requires them to support something that their religious beliefs prohibit.)

The ‘murderer’ example speaks to the second, not the first, consideration.

Let’s move the example to a bit more concrete consideration, then: let’s suppose that a person wishes a baker to bake a cake celebrating the adulterous affair he’s having. Better yet, let’s suppose that this person is a member of a ‘protected minority’ group. Is the baker’s refusal a refusal against the person of the group, or a refusal to celebrate an event which the baker considers immoral? Would the baker’s willingness to bake for persons in that protected group in the past be evidence that it’s the latter, rather than the former, consideration?

By the way, ‘homosexuality’ isn’t a protected minority. It’s a sexual orientation.

Homosexuals, on the other hand, are protected. They cannot be discriminated against, based on their sexual orientation.

However, the question being asked is whether their actions – legal, but held to be immoral by some religious communities – must be celebrated by those who disagree with the morality of the actions…

 

[StephenButler]

That is very legalistic, and the truth is lost arguing over semantics. This isn’t a court of law or a High School debate. It’s a discussion about making a moral choice in a secular society.

Catholic bakers know perfectly well that they serve customers for marriages which the Catholic church, their belief system, does not support. Not asking isn’t an argument. They don’t ask, and they don’t care. Gay weddings are being singled out for persecution, and this is wrong. Society is secular. Just because homosexual acts are considered immoral by Catholics does not mean society agrees, and if you do business with society, then it is society’s moral choices which must prevail in the interest of peaceful society.

Beyond that, it is important to treat people with decency even when you disagree with their choices. Jesus broke bread with tax collectors, and so should we. It is not moral to treat people badly because they disagree with Catholic dogma.

 

[lilypadrees]

A Catholic could bake a cake for a gay couple’s ceremony. But should a Catholic do it? The answer is NO!

 

[Tis_Bearself]

In law, we must always ignore the reasons why a case is being brought, and simply decide the case on its merits.

Do you really think this happens? Maybe sometimes, but certainly not all the time. Especially when you get up into the appeals levels. If everybody did this, we would have a world of opinions as concise as Justice Thomas’. We do not.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

From that, I use my best moral judgment to make a selfless choice which is good for all, a choice which leads to peace, encourages people to love one another, and treat one another as valuable.

That seems to be what Jesus did.

This is fine, but you must also leave room for others to go through the same process and make a choice that they think is more in line with WWJD.

You do not necessarily have the entire market cornered on living up to the Jesus ideal. This has been the problem all through history: not so much that one guy has good intentions and the other bad intentions - that’s an easy choice. More like both guys are acting totally differently and both out of good intentions. That’s a hard choice.

 

[Benadam]

My son’s girlfriend became homeless. I allowed her to move into my house. I know they are acting like they are married and they both expected to be sharing a room. They are both in their early twenties. When she started bringing her stuff into his room, I started grappling with the 'they are adults I should let them be ’ ‘but am I just going to allow this kind of lifestyle under my roof’ ''this is making me feel very uncomfortable ‘Hey I am participating in their sin!’
Anyway, my conscience was letting me know I couldn’t let this happen. I made her move into a different room and explainrd that I wasnt going to let my house be a place they could live like man and wife and that there is no funny business allowed.
It’s been a bit difficult but I know I am doing the right thing.
So, if two people of the same sex wanted me to bake a wedding cake customized for their situation, I would go through the same kind of internal struggle. I would come to the ssme conclusion for the same reasons and not want to do it.
Would you make me do it Anyway? Would it bother you to make me violate my conscience?

 

[Crocus]

I think a more important question is: should a gay person have to bake a cake promoting Catholic views on homosexuality?

I consider myself somewhat creative, but I can’t come up with any idea of what that cake would look like!

 

[1ke]

It might look something like this image:

 

[Kei]

Not all weddings need to be Catholic to be valid.

And the thing about gay weddings is that it is obviously wrong, you can look and see it is wrong without prying into their lives, ie looking to see if they have already married validly.

The thing is, it’s not about the homosexuality, but about the homosexual wedding, which would be a direct, obvious, and clear sin against the Sacrament of marriage. That’s what I’d assume. Likewise, you assume the worst of the bakers when you say it is because they simply don’t want to serve gays.
Do they not serve single gay men and/or women who just want cake? My guess would be yes.

 

[PaulinVA]

We are a religious minority.

Do you really want to have religious discrimination enshrined in our laws? We need to keep the first amendment for important things.

Baking a cake as an an artistic expression protected by the first amendment is a stretch. A big stretch.

I do not want to have this country get to the point that Catholics can’t buy goods from people because they think we are a pedophile religion or they think we are all going to hell.

 

[PetraG]

A baker could refuse to put figurines depicting people on any cakes they bake. They could say, “I’ll write messages on the tops of cakes but not on the sides of cakes or on anything but the top of a tiered cake.” That’s not a stretch. They could refuse to use khaki green icing. That’s an artistic policy.

A baker who says, “I’ll put a figurine with a white bride and groom or a black bride and groom but not a black bride and a white groom” is not going to be protected by the 1st Amendment, nor is one who won’t use a figurine depicting two men in tuxedos or two women in long white gowns.

 

[Benadam]

But on the other hand, I would think there are many more cake makers that can make acake for them without violating their conscience than there are that it would. Wouldn’t it be more civil of SS couples to buy their cake from them rather than force a particular cake maker to violate their conscience when they really don’t have too? Shouldn’t a conscience that the laws of the land have never caused violence to before be respected? What is more civil?