Yes. Do you now understand why it's important this is a trickle, not a flood, of the poor and ignorant barbarians from across the world? Do you now understand why it is important to police who comes into your country, and first educate them to secular values-- or, even better, to selectively cull only those who seek your country because they share its values, and want to escape that barbarism, not simply because they are weaker barbarians fleeing stronger barbarians? A culture cannot be better than its people. No secular humanist government with a spine will ever see its population become predominantly Sharia-advocating Sunni Muslim. That darkness cannot succeed if you don't allow it, or worse, abet it.
and/or
No. First, let's parse this from discrimination of traits which are wholly innate and cannot be changed (i.e. skin color, gender, etc). We are not talking about
traits. We are talking about
beliefs and
behavior.
Second, again, nothing about this entails discrimination. Discrimination is intrinsic only to a denial of service to a specific group that is afforded to the general public.
Custom orders (such as those involving the cake in Oregon) are inherently immune to this critique. Simply because a baker is willing to use his business to offer a custom service where he bakes cakes for heterosexual couples does not behold him to do the same for a homosexual couples. These custom services are not symmetrical.
Otherwise, where does that end? There are lots of demands (since we aren't requesting here) that a person could make for a custom order that do not violate any legal spirit, but would be incredibly offensive to me. Ask me to bake a cake that says, "Kill White People!" just because speech is free? Not me. Piss off. Find another baker.
This is a trope of a familiar, failed argument, but more appropriately deployed, here. Personally, I never found the argument that would deny homosexual civil unions by splitting hairs between same-sex vs. heterosexual couples as asymmetrical institutions (i.e. man+man is not the same as man+woman) to be compelling because it entailed a denial-of-services to gay couples on behalf of the state that are matters of secular law (ex. the classic example from the film
Philadelphia where he couldn't stay with his partner in the hospital because he wasn't "immediate family"...and that's just the tip of the iceberg).
From a secular point of view, that isn't a compelling argument. The secularists among us see that these people are partners, who love each other, live together, get sick together, share bank accounts or other resources together, pay taxes together, and intertwine their lives in a virtually identical way to heterosexual couples. Thus, at least in the eyes of the State, pertaining to legal rights, they should be afforded equal rights.
But we're no longer talking about the
State. We are now talking about
private individuals, and private individuals have the right to their religious beliefs in their own private businesses. They are not denying anyone the right to marry. They are not denying them state rights. They aren't even denying them the right to shop in their stores off the shelves, or to custom order those same heterosexual wedding cakes. They are denying a specific service, not a general service. They are denying it (a homosexual wedding cakes) to heterosexuals the same as they are denying it to homosexuals. So I don't see how this violates the Civil Rights Act.
Hell, this isn't even a matter of minority oppression. Gays might be a minority,
but people who support gay marriage are not the minority, anymore. So your hypothetical there deviates from reality, and the metaphor lacks weight.
I acknowledge the weight of logic behind the Civil Rights Act, but this isn't that. This is government overreach. This is liberal bullying.
