I think we are all missing the right way to look at this - not because I will now tell you all how smart I am and what the right way is, but because I just dont think we are thinking about this right.
I know its wrong to force the baker to serve everyone even if he thinks by doing so he is participating in moral behavior he disapproves of. I also know that back in the 50's if all the hotels in an area decided not rent rooms to blacks it would be possible for a black family to show up in town and have no place to stay. Or with restaurants not food to eat.
I a single business chooses to lose business it makes no difference. If all the businesses do this people can die. If many do this people are seriously inconvenienced. Are the courts supposed to make decisions based on how many people are engaging in refusing service? I dont think they should make decisions that way.
From the same angle with different language: all rights are individual rights not collective rights. Each individual business has a right to decide with whom it will do business. If they all collectively discriminate it will harm people greatly - but we have to consider the rights individually not collectively. As long as most businesses serve people only inconvenience results and the individual rights of business owners is upheld. that is the state of affairs right now.
So what if all businesses refuse to serve gays or blacks? Might the case be made that they are colluding with each other? The refusal of service would not be a matter we could hold them to the fire for but the collusion would be. They should be presecuted for colluding to harm people. Or should they? the source of the collusion is likely to be the bible in the case of gays. Would actively trying to get everyone to agree with a certain interpretation of the bible be collusion? With blacks the source of the collusion could be traced to our founding fathers who simply believed that blacks and whites were so different that they could never live together. A position which is being challenged but is by no means disproved yet. is it really collusion if people are just holding to a collective view based on their religion?
I dont have the answers but I think it is a bit silly for the baker to think that his serving a cake to a gay couple is a moral conundrum - I mean, its a cake dude. Thats just commerce not an endorsement of homosexuality. Is it the same when hotels rent room to unmarried teens? I kind of think that what goes on in the room moral or otherwise is not the responsibility of the hotel owner. And since we are talking about what is silly - yo gay dude, go to another baker. we all know that your real reason for bringing this to court is that you want to force everyone not only to serve you cake but to give you acceptance for being gay. well its not the job of the state to make people accept your lifestyle. you dont really want justice you want to unjustly make people love what you love. In fact you might be just like the baker who is likely doing the same thing and using morality as an excuse to punish people for not agreeing.
We live in a plurality, a culture were there are goig to be lots of different ideas and way of doing things. we really need to let other people do their own thing.
