1.) no harm no foul!
There is no right to buy a cake its about discrimination. You are correct currently on a national level sexual orientation is not protected but I was adressing your statment of force and you saying:
" Businesses should be allowed to refuse service to whomever they choose. "
I think they should certainly be allowed to refuse business to anyone, so long as it is not done for reasons of discrimination as prescribed by law. I think that is fair way to get to where I am going. If the customer is too pushy, wants me to create something genuinely offensive or dishonest, they act like jerks, etc. Reason that have nothing to do with the type of discrimination we are discussing here.
Did you mean whoever as in "IF" they are not currently nationally protected by civil rights?
That's where I was going. There are valid instances where a business owner is very justified in refusing to serve someone. Discrimination as a matter of law, is not one of them.
2.) no problem again
3.) Yes but in this case it is illegal. While not nationally the dishonest excuse of religion has never been a legal reason to break the law.
Agree with you but I will say that I don't think the religious excuse is dishonest, I think it is abhorrent. If someone allows their religious beliefs to dictate how they treat others, fine, makes it easy to identify them and call them out. There are plenty of racists and homophobes who cite their religious beliefs as the reason the self-segregate. When they say God demands it, I say fine..."you're still a bigoted asshole, and your religion sucks as bad as you do."
I mean i WISH you were right, I wish(ESPECIALLY IN 2018) these things WOULD work themselves out but they simply dont in the majority of cases and we would be a much worse country without these laws and protections for all of us.
What I was getting at was that if a businesses operates in a manner that offends some of their customers, it has repercussions. Such as lost business revenue from people refusing to patronize their business as a result of their reputation, bad reviews on social media, etc. I penalize bad businesses with closing up my wallet and giving them a bad rating on social media outlets, and they hate it.
The law will not change the way this people think or feel (and I'm not suggesting the law be changed), they will continue to refuse service to those they are bigoted against, they just won't make a spectacle of it. They'll cite some other reason (customer was rude, we had too many other things going on to make the cake they wanted and they weren't interested in what we had available, etc.).
I fully appreciate what purpose the law serves. I think one of my faults (if you can call it that) as a straight, white man I can easily find myself discussing the subject of civil rights and end up in trick bag without intending to go there. Being entirely honest, I cannot fully understand what it is like to be discriminated against the way minorities do. Which is why I occasionally end up having to clarify a lot of things. I was involved in the "Jeff Sessions/Anglo-American heritage" discussion in another thread and we were discussing whether or not it was actually important to cling to the "Anglo" part of the Anglo-American legal tradition. You would have thought I was proposing we piss on the flag.