Re: “,” Dec. 9 letters to the editor.
Your letter-writers presented good arguments except an obvious one regarding the making of a cake for the gay couple’s wedding. The Supreme Court need not conclude in the Colorado cake case in which baker Jack Phillips refused to make an artistic cake for a gay couple that his making their cake would be equivalent to endorsing their lifestyle. It is not. Many businesses sell created goods to sell to gay couples without implicitly choosing to support their way of life. That Phillips would sell them a “regular” cake speaks to his act of discrimination not as a matter of his faith but as a willful insult. This couple was apparently not good enough to deserve his star treatment.
Phillips was not asked to create a permanent public mural of the couple making out or that he would have been obligated to sign, nor was he asked to attend the wedding ceremony to serve it. The guests would presumably have eaten his wedding cake without knowing the political qualms of it having been made by a bigot. Sometimes a cake is just a cake, except, of course, when it is not.
ܲٱԳǴڱ, Fort Collins
Several writers on the Masterpiece Cake controversy missed a very critical point. Once a retailer decides on his business, the law requires that he serve everyone equally. If he decides he is a singer of Muslim music and a patron requests he record a Christian song, he can legitimately say that is not his business. Likewise, if the vendor’s business is selling kosher food and ham is not part of his menu, refusing to sell ham to an insistent patron is not a problem if he refuses to sell ham to everyone. Cake baker Jack Phillips decided he is in the wedding cake design business and routinely provides that service to everyone except, in this case, a gay couple. Phillips may justify this discrimination by citing his religious views, but his personal values cannot be allowed to override the American value that all our citizens are entitled to equal and dignified treatment.
ٴdzܲ¾, Thornton
If any other store just didn’t carry what the gay couple were looking for — let’s say blue tablecloths — they would just have taken what the store had or gone to another one, not sued for discrimination. If Masterpiece Cakeshop just doesn’t carry gay wedding cakes, what’s the difference? The decoration of the cake is a form of expression or speech, not a refusal to sell a cake. The real question the Supreme Court must decide is whether government can coerce or force an individual to express what it deems desirable. Does Colorado’s public accommodations statute outweigh freedom of speech, or in this case non-speech, guaranteed in the Bill of Rights?
±Ա, Centennial
I feel only sympathy that Jack Phillips has been dragged through so much ugliness, costing him a lot of time and money. If someone didn’t want to bake me a cake, I’d simply shop somewhere else. It could have been that simple for both the gay couple and for Phillips.
ԲԱ-Ѳ¾ٳ, Carbondale
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