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0 pointsbusymom06y ago0 comments

Forcing a baker to bake a cake by taking him to court was speech I am sure.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

shadowgovt6y ago· 2 in thread

Do you remember the outcome of that case?

There's been several cases of this type:

> Justices handed a small victory to Melissa and Aaron Klein, the owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Gresham, Oregon by dismissing a state court ruling against them and telling state judges to look at it again. By doing so they avoided a high-profile decision on competing claims between gay rights activists and businesses which refuse to serve them on religious grounds, an issue which could have become electric in an election year had it stayed on the court's docket into 2020...

So in this one, the supreme court didn't really make a decision. They sent it back to the lower court.

But that baker is now back in court again with a different gay couple. So people definitely like forcing him:

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/masterpiece-cakeshop...

Another case had opposite outcome:

> 2018 ruling, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the Court ruled that a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for the wedding of two men must do so.

Another case also had opposite outcome:

> A similar case, involving a florist in Washington state who refused to provide flowers for a same-sex ceremony there, is on the way to the high court. The Washington Supreme Court had previously ruled against the florist, reviewed the case in light of the Masterpiece decision, and recently reaffirmed its unanimous decision.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/17/supreme-court-passes-...

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/usa-supreme-court-re...

shadowgovt6y ago

Notice the common thread: the bakers in question are only able to even float the case by claiming their cakes are artistic expression, and therefore protected. Good luck passing the most basic argument that providing electricity is artistic expression. And this entire diversion is irrelevant to the meta-question; the President is trying to censor speech he doesn't like, he's not trying to force speech out of someone who would prefer to be silent. Your examples of LGBT and black voices being censored in the past are irrelevant; if the President were, hypothetically, saying "Black people" or "LGBTQ people are human beings, deserving of all rights" and Twitter were fact-checking with boxes saying "[citations from phrenology] indicate black people have inferior brain construction," that would be distasteful and disgusting in the extreme, and worthy of leaving Twitter over as an individual user... But not something the President should shut them down for. The First Amendment exists (among other reasons) so the President's viewpoint isn't the only legally allowed viewpoint, for good and ill.

You dodged the meta-question by trying to appeal to the specific attack on Section 230 that has been proposed (scoped to particular sizes) so you didn't have to answer whether the HN shutdown hypothetical would be acceptable. It would not be. Neither would shutting down Twitter. Size is irrelevant.

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