Report: "Christian photographer sues Virginia over law that may force him to service gay weddings."

[Freddy]

Freddy:

A life long commitment to another person (which happens to be legally recognised). Your mileage may vary.

I might strike “life long” from that. Just as there are civil marriages there are also civil divorces.

I would define civil marriage as state recognized contract between a couple to recognize each other as a spouse.

Love, sex, children, and even commitment will vary.

In my view, the marriage part is just a process a couple goes through to celebrate the commitment with friends and family (we didn’t do that - it was just us and two random witnesses) and to make it legal (my wife’s insistance on the paperwork to clarify the legal position of our children).

It’s only the commitment that counts. And who says ‘will you commit to me for a while?’ I know exactly what Caz would have said to that question…

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

I didn’t need to study the history of marriage before I asked my wife.

Right - because we just knew. Governments have prescribed something broader in recent times and many have taken that on-board

To be honest, I don’t know what the definition of marriage is where I used to live when we got married, what it was where we got married or what it is where we live now. I just know that when someone says that they are married, they have made a lifetime comittment to each other.

What gender they are is completely irrelevant.

 

[catholicray]

A life long commitment to another person (which happens to be legally recognised). Your mileage may vary.

Sooooo a really good friendship?

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

A life long commitment to another person (which happens to be legally recognised). Your mileage may vary.

Sooooo a really good friendship?

If that’s how you would describe your relationship with your spouse then that’s up to you. It would certainly be one of the ways I’d describe the relationship with my wife.

 

[catholicray]

If that was all there was between my spouse and I, yes I’d call it a friendship albeit a really good one. Lol. I’m committed to my own parents for life for example but I don’t consider that marriage.

 

[Rau]

What gender they are is completely irrelevant.

But you have lived for long enough to know that the now commonly held idea of persons of the same sex marrying is a quite new phenomena, right?

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

What gender they are is completely irrelevant.

But you have lived for long enough to know that the now commonly held idea of persons of the same sex marrying is a quite new phenomena, right?

As I said, my definition of a marriage is making a lifetime commitment to someone. I was aware that people of the same sex were doing that when I was relatively young. That it’s now accepted as being a marriage and is described as such is quite a new phenomena.

 

[MNathaniel]

MNathaniel:

But a ritual celebrating erotic interactions and establishing contractual obligations between two people of identical genitalia isn’t a wedding, period.

So you’re saying that two people of the same gender are incapable of feeling romantic love for each other? Not even that they shouldn’t, but that it’s physically impossible? That sexual attraction and pragmatism is all there is?

‘Erotic’, derived from ‘Eros’: One of the four Ancient Greek terms that can be rendered in English as ‘love’. The other three are storge, philia, and agape. Eros refers to “passionate love” or romance .

Erotic interaction = romantic interaction.

 

[Inquiry]

Okay, you’ve got an argument for why he shouldn’t have a problem taking these photos. Yet if he still does, even if you are certain he is wrong, that’s still his right. Coercing him to take them anyways is still wrong. Moreover if he accedes to that coercion not out of a change of heart but just due to the threat of force, that is him participating in something wrong.

You’ve done a very good job of framing why from one specific angle there might not be a problem. There are other major problems though, and they don’t go away just because we are careful at keeping them out of frame.

 

[Mister_Friscus]

There is a HUGE difference between a government telling you what you cannot do and a government forcing you to do things.

The latter is creepy, totalitarian stuff with horrible inhumane history. It’s like the government mandated compelled speech of gender pronouns. You must participate in supporting a side of an issue that isn’t settled. It’s like forcing pro-choice people to call the “fetus” a “baby”, and if they object, shaming them for not being considerate of offending those who are pro-life, the conservative side.

Of course, this doesn’t happen, and won’t happen.; The Conservative side’s emotions and offense is never considered. Victimhood appears to only go one way. Conservatives (and Christians) are expected to change their ideological and moral stances for the greater good of everyone being happy. The same goes here with the photographer, and the wedding cake.

“Diversity” of skin color, not diversity of thought… clearly. If the government is forcing people to act, it’s not a good thing. It’s textbook totalitarian evil.

 

[Calliope]

I’m an artist and I reserve the right to choose which commisions I take and which I don’t. My services aren’t necessities, they are luxuries and there are myriad reasons I turn down certain requests.

I think photographers and fancy cake bakers are likewise artists providing a luxury service. I think they have the right to pick and choose jobs.

It’s not like a hospital, pharmacy, food store or apartment complex turning down people for necessities. There are and needs to be anti discrimination laws to protect needed services.

Art is another matter.

 

[dochawk]

speaking as a lawyer . . .

I think this is pretty much settled by prior Supreme Court decisions (particularly the bakery).

As I think about how to reconcile the various cases, I think the line will come down to whether or not there is any create content, which is in itself “speech”.

So, no, religious objections won’t allow not selling a #10 pizza, or the chocolate sheet case with buttercream frosting.

It will cover framing a picture by a photographer, or putting a message on top of that standard cake.

Again, when speech or creativity is involved, one can’t be compelled, while for a standard product without customization, service cannot be denied.

There is no sin in taking photos of a gay wedding, at least none that I know of.

That is not for you to decide.

For legal issues, with 200 years of precedent, the court will not look at the validity or “correctness” of the belief, but only the sincerity of which it is held/

No other party will be making the analysis of whether or not it is a sin: not the customer, not the court, nor anyone else.

People have the right to refuse service to anyone that they don’t want to serve. It shouldn’t matter what the reason is. It’s a free country.

If you sell burgers all day, then, no, you cannot decline service on the basis of any “protected” classification (race, creed, etc.), nor can you require, for example, one race to not sit at the counter, or the back of your private bus, or . . .

 

[Freddy]

I’m an artist and I reserve the right to choose which commisions I take and which I don’t. My services aren’t necessities, they are luxuries and there are myriad reasons I turn down certain requests.

I think photographers and fancy cake bakers are likewise artists providing a luxury service. I think they have the right to pick and choose jobs.

So it would be ok to put on their business cards ‘No blacks, Irish or Jews’?

 

[Lara]

Being black, Irish, or Jewish, has nothing to do with contracting a gay “wedding,” and then forcing a photographer to participate in it as a photographer.

The situation is more like this: the King has summoned you to take photos, and he has prepared the guillotine if you don’t show up.

 

[Freddy]

Being black, Irish, or Jewish, has nothing to do with contracting a gay “wedding,” and then forcing a photographer to participate.

It has everything to do with personal beliefs.

 

[Lara]

Exactly. And those personal beliefs should allow you to follow your conscience (the photographer’s conscience, not the conscience of the LGBT warrior.)

 

[EssentialBeing]

I understand the need to allow business to self determine who they serve, but this sets an extremely poor precedence. A photographer that chooses to service a particular demographic or not, is the same as a surgeon also deciding who they want to save or not.

What if the top five surgeons in the country where all non Catholics, should they have the right to not operate on Catholics? Or a major food supplier choosing to only feed Buddhists? Its a difficult proposition riddled with many problems

 

[Freddy]

Exactly. And those personal beliefs should allow you to follow your conscience (the photographer’s conscience, not the conscience of the LGBT warrior.)

So you agree with what could be printed on a business card.

 

[Inquiry]

Calliope:

I’m an artist and I reserve the right to choose which commisions I take and which I don’t. My services aren’t necessities, they are luxuries and there are myriad reasons I turn down certain requests.

I think photographers and fancy cake bakers are likewise artists providing a luxury service. I think they have the right to pick and choose jobs.

So it would be ok to put on their business cards ‘No blacks, Irish or Jews’?

That’s blatant hyperbole. What you describe and what @Calliope describes are different issues (persons vs contexts) and even if we say that your business cards are beyond the pale, that doesn’t mean artists cannot turn down commissions.

Remember, artistry falls under the category of speech. No matter how much you disagree with an artist’s choices you cannot limit or compel their speech to correct the balance.

 

[Freddy]

Freddy:

Calliope:

I’m an artist and I reserve the right to choose which commisions I take and which I don’t. My services aren’t necessities, they are luxuries and there are myriad reasons I turn down certain requests.

I think photographers and fancy cake bakers are likewise artists providing a luxury service. I think they have the right to pick and choose jobs.

So it would be ok to put on their business cards ‘No blacks, Irish or Jews’?

That’s blatant hyperbole. What you describe and what @Calliope describes are different issues (persons vs contexts) and even if we say that your business cards are beyond the pale, that doesn’t mean artists cannot turn down commissions.

Remember, artistry falls under the category of speech. No matter how much you disagree with an artist’s choices you cannot limit or compel their speech to correct the balance.

You think people having a bias against blacks, homosexuals and Jews is hyperbole? Honestly…?

There is a park on the headland just down the road from where I live. It will be the site for a memorial for all the gay bashings and deaths that have ocurred in Sydney over the last 40 of 50 years.

“The cliff-side park will become a memorial to those men after it was chosen as the site for a monument to victims of the city’s wave of gay hate crimes from the 1970s to the 1990s.” Gay beat to tribute: Bondi's Marks Park to get hate crime memorial

One cafe literally a couple of hundred metres from where I live almost closed their doors because of the public backlash when the manager told a black South African that he was being laid off his job as a barista because the manager said he thought that the locals didn’t want a black guy serving them.

This area also has a lot of Jewish people living here. Every synagogue has to hire security because there are morons about who would like to rearrange the facades of their places of worship. I’m ashamed of that fact.

Don’t kid yourself, Inquiry. There’s a lot of hate and distrust bubbling around under the surface even in 'burbs such as this one which is one of the more multiracial areas in an already multiracial city in a very multiracial country. One which prides itself on the movement we’ve made to greater equality for our fellow Australians who are gay.

Have we done enough? Not nearly enough. Feel free to point out our failings. But what we don’t want is for people to consider those who are black or have a different religion or speak a different language or who are gay to be treated differently to anyone else.

So yeah, there are people about whose beliefs would allow them the moral right as they see it to put ‘No blacks, Jews or Gays’ on their business cards or on a sign in their shop fronts. And your argument is to say it’s not the same.

Your argument is to say that all you want to do is allow people to put that last group on the sign.