“We Don’t Serve Homosexuals” Do You Want To Live in An America Like That?

The front view of the statue of liberty with fighter planes racing across the sky behind this great New York City Monument

I wrote about the custom wedding cake case. As you know it is a situation where a baker refused to bake a custom-made wedding cake for the two men who planned to get married. He said it was for two reasons. One, it violated his religion and also it infringed on his right to free speech. Although putting the Constitution aside the reason was he, like others, have a hard time accepting the idea of two men getting married.

I wondered what the baker would have done if two guys came in holding hands, told him they were married, and wanted to buy a loaf of bread.  Or what if they were married but did not tell him that but just held hands. Would it be against his religion to sell them the bread? What if they were both poor and hungry and he was handing out stale bread for free? Would he refuse them? What does his religion say about dealing with the poor and hungry?  Does it say inquire about their sexual preference before feeding? If the baker is a Christian did he know about Christ feeding the multitude with his miracle of bread and fish and He not putting any preconditions on who ate.

We know about this case because it was heard before the Supreme Court the other day. Justice Anthony Kennedy asked a lawyer representing the baker, if the baker could put a sign in his window saying: “We don’t bake cakes for gay weddings.” The lawyer answered yes because as long as the cakes were custom-made the baker’s artistic expression would be covered under the First Amendment.

But we know that is a foolish answer. The artistic expression says nothing.  It is a design on a wedding case. Who has ever looked at a wedding case and received a message from one. The idea of freedom of speech is that everyone has a right to express an opinion or a thought or an idea.

Even though the Supreme Court says money is speech it has not said every inanimate object is speech even if someone altered it. The baker is not being asked to say anything just bake a wedding cake and decorate it. Putting a brick in the side of a wall is not speech no matter how skilled the bricklayer.

The baker is defending his refusal not only on an infringement on his speech but also as violating his freedom of religion. Sarah Sanders when asked ‘does the president agree that would be ok” if someone one could put a sign in their window that read “We don’t bake cakes for gay weddings.”  She answered: “The president certainly supports religious liberty and that’s something he talked about during the campaign and has upheld since taking office.” She was then asked whether that would include putting up such a sign. She replied: “I believe that would include that.” How religious liberty means someone can say he won’t serve a particular clientele escapes me.

The president is ok with putting up anti-gay signs. But I ask as an American is that what we want in America? I thought we had fought that fight when blacks were not able to sit at lunch counters in the South. Do you remember how long those Jim Crow laws which made blacks second class citizens were in existence before something was done about them? It was about 100 years. Will we have to have another 100 years before gay citizens receive equal rights? Do you think that is a good idea?

You do not have equal rights if someone refuses you something they give to all others for the reason you are gay. I will be surprised the Supreme Court would have a split in opinion over this issue. Isn’t it easy to see that it will have the effect of driving wedges between people?

Isn’t it time the justices on the Supreme Court forget all the legal mumbo jumbo and do what is right for the country so that hatred and bigotry is chased out. What would be so hard for the Supreme Court to say that any business enterprise in the country open to the public has to make it wares available to all the people on equal terms. Shouldn’t that be the essence of America. I thought our nation’s motto is e pluribus unum, out of many one?

No one’s religious belief is being trampled upon by having that as a basic rule in our country. If a person’s religion does not let him treat all people equally then the person should not go into the  business of serving the public.

 

18 Comments

  1. If you discriminate unjustly, you miss out on so many beautiful persons. I’ve noticed orthodox folks, strict conservatives, some almost isolationist, can be the most loving, caring, self-sacrificing . . .Some of those Medic C.O.s . . .7th Day Adventist types . . .quakers … Sgt. York
    As an Irish-Catholic American, i’ve been so moved and inspired by the self-sacrifice and devotion of rabbis, ministers, priests, Catholic, Orthodox, Congregational etc, I’ve read, listened to and known. And as far as their daughters, nieces, cousins go . . . brains, beauty, artistry . . .
    and the men . . . many of them great handball players, poets, writers, shrinks, judges, surgeons, fishermen, . . .

    Now here’s where i disagree . . . we all discriminate . . .See, I like, say, Greek girls or German girls or Chinese-American girls or white, brown, black, best or better . . . that’s fine tuning, being discriminating in tastes, not the bad kind

    I do discriminate I’m sorry, against men with high pitched screechy or squeaky voices . . .

  2. Steve Hochstadt sponsored my conference
    on cimes committed by the FBI for 11 years
    at Bates College where he was a professor
    for 26 years

    http://stevehochstadt.blogspot.com/2017/12/keeping-blacks-far-away.html

    We don’t serve blacks, either……..

    Tuesday, December 12, 2017

    Keeping the Blacks Far Away

    I grew up in Carle Place, a new suburban town on Long Island, outside of New York City. Young families lived in inexpensive but well-constructed houses in quiet residential neighborhoods with good schools. When I get together with my classmates at reunions, we all agree that our little town offered a wonderful place to grow up.

    I never thought about black kids, because I never saw one in my neighborhood or at my schools, right up through high school. I knew black people lived in other towns, and sometimes we faced black kids in athletic contests. I never wondered why they didn’t live near me.

    Now I know. I’ve been reading a book titled “The Color Of Law” by Richard Rothstein, who explains how residential segregation happened in America and in my home town.

    In response to the government-created Jim Crow discrimination in the South, millions of African Americans moved north in the Great Migration after World War I. At the same time, the nation’s population doubled from 1900 to 1950.

    Facing growing population, American cities used zoning laws to direct new construction and to control where people lived. Across the country, zoning was designed to keep black and white apart, to protect white neighborhoods against black people. For example, in St. Louis zoning guided liquor stores, polluting industries, bars, and rooming houses into African American neighborhoods, preserving real estate values in white neighborhoods and creating black slums.

    Private business supported segregation. The National Association of Real Estate Brokers adopted a code of ethics in 1924 warning its members that “a realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood members of any race or nationality whose presence would clearly be detrimental to property values.”

    In the midst of the Depression, the federal government used its enormous resources to promote home ownership. In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration, part of the New Deal, created affordable mortgages and made loans to encourage home ownership based on color-coded maps of every city, where black neighborhoods were colored red, meaning no help for residents. After World War II, the newly created Veterans Administration offered mortgages to returning servicemen with no down payments and low interest rates, but only for whites.

    Collaborating with private developers, banks, and realtors, the federal government helped create the new suburbs which mushroomed around America’s cities. I lived in a suburb built by William Levitt, whose name has become synonymous with suburbanization. His signature project was Levittown, a development with 17,500 mass-produced two-bedroom homes a few miles from where I lived. He repeated this success in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. Behind him stood the FHA and the VA, which financed Levittown on the condition that it be all white. In 1953, the 70,000 residents of Levittown represented the largest all-white American community.

    Carle Place was a microcosm of postwar America. Young white men and women could begin their long climb into affluence, security, and respectability through the American dream of home-ownership. Realtors would guide families into the mushrooming modern neighborhoods. Banks offered more favorable terms than ever before. And everybody depended on governments to allocate local spaces for new construction, advise the new projects, and guarantee the loans that bought the houses.

    For white people. Not for black people.

    So I grew up with no relationships with black Americans, whom I first met in college during the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. By that time, for me and my suburban baby-boomer peers, getting to know African Americans was awkward and uncertain. We were all, black and white, deprived of the natural development of friendships across lines of race.

    Blacks were deprived of much more than that. As I was growing up, Carle Place and much of Long Island embodied a futuristic landscape of tens of thousands of identical houses in geometric patterns on plowed over, treeless ground. Today shady streets, mature landscaping, and countless home expansions and improvements have transformed the aesthetics. The houses that cost about $10,000 to buy now sell for $400,000 to $700,000. Accounting for inflation, the white families like mine, that bought in the late 1940s and early 1950s, tripled or quadrupled their wealth through home ownership.

    Instead, black families were forced to live in urban neighborhoods, where discriminatory zoning rules kept home values down. At least into the 1990s, toxic waste facilities continued to be built in minority neighborhoods. Urban highways were typically built through minority neighborhoods. It is still common in American cities to use zoning laws to place businesses that deal with alcohol, firearms, pornography, and now marijuana into low-income neighborhoods, preventing minorities there from building up equity as fast as in residential white neighborhoods.

    The end of slavery in 1865 represented the beginning of other forms of government-enforced discrimination for another century. By helping white families to build up wealth through home ownership and preventing black families from doing the same, federal, state and local governments have contributed to today’s racial disparities in wealth.

    As Richard Rothstein wrote, “Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation.” All Americans have suffered from this history of racism.

    Steve Hochstadt
    Jacksonville IL

  3. buncha psychos in the comment section

  4. There is a difference between serving a homosexual and serving an individual’s homosexuality. These “customers” set the baker up to extort subservience to their peculiarity and money for their legal representatives, Champerty, Shyster & Fraud. There is nothing so essential to the decoration of a wedding cake that warrants the government to interpose itself in the trade.

    On Mass Ave between Newbury Street and Comm Ave there is a filth merchant that peddles and displays, for children to see, sex objects, including things like penis cakes. Should a baker be forced to cater to the perverse taste of every degenerate fancy imaginable?

    When I lived in Spain bread prices were set by law. Anything else a baker produced the free market set. Licences were limited; customers, guaranteed. Once the bakers went on strike and the government had the army set up field bakeries to produce what the people needed. No wedding cakes. Just the staff of life, bread. A baker not providing the community with bread was forbidden to sell anything else. Francisco Franco understood the difference between a necessity and that which is optional.

    El Caudillo understood that a totalitarian definition of equality is stifling, oppressive and capricious. He opted for Liberty, that spirit that allows men to be diverse and to seek out their own way of living and loving while at the same time supporting the good of the community.

    “Equality” is ever opposed to Liberty. America was founded on the principle that whenever possible Liberty should prevail.

    There is a distinct odor of class privilege in this entire debate about what citizen is allowed to offer the public. Doctors are not compelled to slaughter unborn children. A surgeon is not forced to perform maiming by reassigning genders or even to cater to non-life threatening cosmetic procedures. No one demands that a corporate lawyer take on a messy divorce or a man in criminal practice to have to tackle tricky tax loopholes. They are allowed professional leeway. They are not formed from a higher grade of clay than others, even bakers.

    Think about that. Does a kollege edgechamakation and shabby shingle hung outside the door entitle attorneys and physicians to be treated as though they are entitled to more human dignity than a baker? All three callings are equally deserving of respect. None of them should be bullied by SJWs who employ the state to harass and harm their businesses. Liberty is more important than Cultural Marxist Identity Politics.

    A man may be born in a housing project. Through hard work he may rise in the eyes of society but that self-elevation should not improve his position one iota on the scales of justice. A humble baker and a high paid professional superstar are entitled to the same presumption of Liberty in the pursuit of their respective trades. Forced equality is an infringement on Liberty and should be kept to an absolute minimum. Wedding cakes do not rise to the level of that base mark.

    • “Francisco Franco understood the difference between a necessity and that which is optional.”

      I guess mass murder was a necessity, not an option.

      He knew the difference between the negative and positive terminals on a truck battery, too.

  5. ” It is a design on a wedding case . (sic)
    Who has ever looked at a wedding case (sic) and received a message from one ? ”

    Well , your … Unconscious…. Speaks True !

    It was always about making a case for radical political reasons in a situation where common sense indicated that this poor jack Mormon baker should have been left in peace . Who loves cake ? Lawyers are involved . We are sure of this !

  6. You’re first sentence stopped me:
    I am opposed to gay marriage; First I think it detracts from procreative marriage between a man and woman, which is nature’s way . . . must be the biologic scientist in me; second to give any government benefits to two homosexual men who marry, discriminates against two heterosexual friends or brothers or other family (Uncle and second nephew twice removed who live together.

    My solution no government benefits to anyone unless your raising children . . . you know I mean we got to help the poor.

    As a matter of common sense . . .

    Well, put it this way I agree with the four dissenting judges . . .

    This is the same foolish attack that was made on St. Pat’s Day Parades in NYC and Boston

    Won’t it be wonderful when we have to say, LGBTQISTLMNOZIX> Much better when we said, Man and Woman or male and female, or Heterosexual and different

    Love em and leave em alone, but don’t call it marriage and have the state put its hands in my pockets to subsidize folks’ different lifestyle.

    Sorry gay friends, you’ve heard me say it before, and i’ll say it again….. live your own life, but gay marriage . . .nah!

    Merry Christmas and a belated Happy Hanukkah to all my Judaeo-Christian friends. Would you believe it, I now have a beautiful in-law who is German, French and one-sixteenth Middle Eastern (Lebanese) Muslim and her teenage and younger children are one-thirty second Muslim Arab, I guess. I have to check my own blood to make to see if my Black Irish blood from Western Ireland is infused with Spanish blood . . . they say it is, which means Moors, maybe and maybe other people from the Middle East . . . Jeekers, go back far enough and I may not even be a Christian . . . .it’s enough to make you wonder . . .is that why I fell in love with so many dark haired beauties who traced their genes to Italy, Israel, Greece and Spain. Or is it because I’m Black Irish? But what about the Irish, English, Scandinavian, German and Slavic girls I’ve fallen in love with or the African-American girls . . . .I’ve seen some beautiful Asian girls but I don’t recall falling in love with many, although I can remember some very rare Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Pacific Island girls I’ve seen I thought were scrumptious. I remember when Charlie and I were painting houses and chopping down trees for a living for two years, we’d always stop at this coffee shop on Route 9, near Natick, and the most gorgeous Asian-American girl worked the counter (Chinese-Irish-English, I recall; her dad was in the Navy, an officer . . . you the rest of that story . . . and finally I must remember my wife who was half-Irish, and the other half: English, German, Native American (Cherokee) . . . . and then there the girls in D.C., Virginia and Maryland . . . . I MUST BE A BIGOT . ……..Viet Vet friends Harry and Tuck used to say, “We don’t discriminate when it comes to girls.”

    Finally, I also firmly oppose Roe v. Wade and unjust killings.

    • “I am opposed to gay marriage; First I think it detracts from procreative marriage between a man and woman, which is nature’s way . . .”

      There are a lot of non-procreative marriages between men and women. Can gays marry if they adopt? I mean in your opinion. I know they can.

      My neighbor in Milton tried to have a kid, without success, for 10 years. Then she had a miscarriage. Her born-in-Italy grandfather told me, “She gonna go to Hell-a.” When I asked him why he said, “She don’t-a produce!” Is there some basis for his claim in Catholicism? Do the unproductive pay for it?

      • Ovadia Yosef, the most revered Rabbi of his generation, passed in 2013 at 93 years. He founded the Sha’s Party, an important part of the ruling coalition governing Israel. He was the “greatest” sage of his generation. His funeral was the largest ever in Israel. He preached:

        “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel.”

        “In Israel, death has no dominion over them… With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money.

        “This is his servant… That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew.”

        “Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat… That is why gentiles were created.”

        Query. Can one follow Judaism in any form without being a Jewish Supremacist?

        • “Query. Can one follow Judaism in any form without being a Jewish Supremacist?”

          Yes. But the expression pushy Jew just didn’t fall out of the sky. In many aspects of life Jews don’t like other people and other people don’t like Jews. And I’ll tell you a little secret. A great many Jews are atheists and they also vote Republican. My friends in the JDL up in Boston always laughed about the fact that people mistook them for liberal Dems.

          There are hundreds of Rabbis that do not fall into your category. The Hassids and many of the Orthodox can be perfectly awful. Check out Rabbi Ascherman or Rabbi Ehrenkrantz. They are not Supremacists. Nor was David Eichhorn.

          Now go feed those cats. They’re starving!

      • i’d give benefits any persons raising children

        Why to two childless adults living together?

  7. How many gay bakers can fit on the head of a lady finger ? … OXFORD UNION ….. Debate question . Christmas ’17 .

  8. I assume that if a gay baker refused to produce a cake for an obviously heterosexual couple, these homophobes would have no problem with that. Who knows where those fingers have been!!!!!!

  9. KIM JONG UN viz GAY WEDDING CAKE

    Give them gay bread and circus !

    • I ask, did you catch Kim’s buddy Dennis Rodman on some late night show this week? I just DVR those things. (Can’t stand most of the late night creodonts)

      Man, Dennis Rodman’s brain has spent some time in a waffle iron. And his piercings are out of control. His face looks like an open tackle box.