Soldato
As long as anyone was allowed to buy everything sold, you would be ok with:You've been on a strawman roll in this thread.
Just to position things, I am totally for gay marriage, and I have a number of married gay friends.
If the bakery refused to serve them at all because they are gay, then I would have a clear issue with it. Refusing to create a bespoke item based on it's content is not, I feel, the same thing. They would not offer said product to a heterosexual requester, so they are not discriminating the customer on the grounds of their sexual orientation.
When offering services to a customer, their sexual orientation doesn't come it to play. Cleaning a gay person's house, or selling a gay person a car, is no different from doing the same for a hetero customer in a transactional sense.
- A record store refusing to stock music by black artists?
- A school only providing standing urinals?
- A library refusing to install disabled access?
It's all discriminatory, despite offering the same service to all.
Now THAT is a straw man. Your examples are where insult is being requested, the gay cake was neutral, so they are not comparable.If someone went to bakery and asked for a cake that said "Suck it Brazil, see you next World Cup", and the bakery refused to take on the order (say because they were Brazilian), it would be essentially the same thing. A bumper sticker designer might also refuse a request for a "Mancheser United is for noobs" sticker, as they happen to be a Man U fan.
Are we saying that any company offering bespoke services should be legally obliged to cater to any customer request (provided the request in itself doesn't break any laws)? That's getting a bit too Big Brother for my tastes.
If the cake had said "Christians need to gay up" or some such, then they would have been perfectly entitled to refuse.