Guest Post by The Zman
Whether or not our rulers know this is debatable. A feature of post-modernism is that the people in charge forget everything learned by prior generations regarding the human condition and human society. People used to know the link between free association and other liberties. It is why the state regulated public airwaves. Because it required effort to avoid speech broadcast over the air, that speech had to fit community standards. Speech that took effort to consume, like pay services, were free from state censorship.
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Anyway, the Left is in something close to a full panic over the oral arguments in Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The reason for this is the way Judge Gorsuch questioned the attorney for the homosexuals. He correctly pointed out that the “remedy” for the alleged discrimination, is to force the baker to say things in public that he would never say and that he finds offensive. Gorsuch did not say this, but this is how Chinese communists punished heretics in the Cultural Revolution.
Colorado Civil Rights Commission
Put another way, the “remedy” for those not wanting to associate, in this case do business with, another group of people, is to frog march them into the public square and force them to say things they think are false and possibly evil. Of course, it is the only remedy, short of genocide, that is possible in a society without freedom of association. Once the state can force you to be around other people, people you may not like, they have no choice but to supervise your speech, your thoughts and your every move. You are a slave.
That is the reality of the custodial state. The people in charge see themselves as your caretakers, like a baby sitter or care giver. In reality though, you are their slave, because like a slave, you no longer control your body. They control where it is and what it is permitted to do. In this particular case. the state is trying to force this baker to perform his services for the homosexuals. The efforts to punish him are no different from a slave master flogging a runaway slave. It’s to send a message to the rest of the slaves.
The homosexual Slate writer senses this reality, but he cannot bare to face it because it means questioning the One True Faith. Even worse for him is that homosexuals have created an identity, a sense of worth, based on this notion they are a protected class, given special liberties. A white man can be run out of his job by Antifa loons and no one from the local Civil Rights Commission is coming to his aid. Homosexual terrorists can stalk the nation’s Christian bakers and they get the full support of the state.
What makes this case frightening to the Left is that there is no way for the court to rule in favor of the baker, that does not undermine the foundation of the modern special rights movement. Let’s say they carve out a religious “exception” to the laws providing homosexuals with special status. The court is, in effect, saying that religion ranks higher than sexual proclivity. The gays move down a peg. What happens when the court has to choose between Jews and Nazis? Or Muslims and Jews? It quickly becomes untenable.
This is also why the Court will have no choice but to rule against the baker. The three lesbians and Breyer, of course, are predictable votes against liberty, but Kennedy and Roberts have proven to be reliable defenders of the Progressive movement. Kennedy authored the ridiculous gay marriage ruling, after all. Roberts is smart enough to see how ruling for the baker will unravel the Progressive project, so he will probably come up with some tortured logic to justify the state compelling forced confessions from heretics.
This is the other consequence of eliminating freedom of association. The cost of restoring it always appears too high. Most Southerners before the Civil War understood that slavery was untenable, but the cost of ending it was worse. That’s what’s facing the guardians of our custodial state. They know the regime cooked up to address blacks in the 1960’s can only lead to tyranny, but unraveling it offers near term costs that seem more frightening than whatever comes at some later date. Things will just have to run their course.
It will not end well.
It is already beyond belief, that in the USA THIS case made it to the SCOTUS.
WTF?
How any court at all could have ruled even once that the plaintiffs had anything regarding a case to start with is just beyond understanding.
Especially when then could have just gone to another cake shop to have their fairy cake made.
About gout decades back, actually before that but it became the accepted standard around that time, the Courts assumed the role of legislators by creating new laws according to their individual agendas (which are almost always leftist in nature).
Technically, it’s referred to as “Judicial law”, the published rulings of the Courts that guide other Courts in their decisions, but a better name for it in today’s Courts would be “Judicial legislation”.
“This will not end well ” but end it will sooner or later.
Equality (outside of common sense / moral law / natural law) is a reduction to the mean. The reduction implies direction, or a falling, or trend, towards a destination away from what was better; in essence a lower quality (of living, etc).
It appears the trends cycle continually while never circumventing the inevitable gravitational dynamism of entropy. Perhaps because time a closed system.
But it could be simply because most people are seriously flawed, or at the very least, infused with an innate desire to manage the unmanagable.
Freedom is the better way. Of association, or whatever.
But – without a moral social contract – anarchy and, ultimately, tyranny becomes the mean. Or so it would seem.
When they said we had to bake their cakes, we did. When they said we had to accept their love, we did and they gave us Meningitis, Hepatitis, Herpes, Syphilis and AIDS.
The issue before the court was:
“Whether applying Colorado’s public accommodations law to compel Phillips to create expression that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment.”
Colorado’s public accommodations law:
” It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful for a person, directly or indirectly, to refuse, withhold from, or deny to an individual or a group, because of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry, the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation….”
And:
“As used in this part 6, “place of public accommodation” means any place of business engaged in any sales to the public and any place offering services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations to the public….”
Phillips clearly violated Colorado’s public accommodations law. But did that law violate Phillips’ First Amendment rights? We probably won’t hear the court’s opinion until October.
Does a citizen still have the Right to say no on Solid Religious Grounds or is he/she now the Slave of a Perfidious State?
Notice the Colorado public accommodation law leaves out “religion” is that long list.
“creed”
Sorry, missed that.
Indeed. Where in the U.S. Constitution does ‘sexual orientation’ override the right to express one’s religious beliefs on private property? Was the thought crime committed on private property? Or on property owned by the state? Who decides? These are the questions.
To be honest, discrimination/freedom of association also ends up tying itself into knots. We had restaurants refusing service to negroes when the cook and half the kitchen staff were negroes! A negro could not ride in the first class section of a train but negroes did work as the porters in those same cars.
Could a firearms dealer refuse to sell a gun to a bear hunter on the grounds he opposes the hunting of bears? Rolls Royce deny a NBA star one of their autos because the company thought it bad for the brand?
Yes to all in a thriving free society where private ownership and profit is championed and real diversity encouraged. Lots of restaurants, gun shops and car dealerships out there.
Marriage is also a foundation for all of the world’s main religions. There are no religions that mandate racism against blacks, the protection of bears or corporate brands. All of these are bullshit straw man arguments.
It seems a no brainer, when homosexuality became a protected group under the law, then it just follows that the protected status trumps personal beliefs. The fight was lost with the previous ruling. No matter how the court gets stacked with conservatives, it will take a concerted activist effort to remove the laws currently established.
It’s kind of where we are in the country; the main debate is are we beyond the point of no return?