"That doesn’t mean I agree morally with the choices people make about whom to serve – I think it’s idiotic not to bake a cake for a gay person, a black person, a Jew, or whomever."
Phillips refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Big difference, and Shapiro really ought to know better. (Actually, I'm sure he does know better; he was just being careless here, but it still matters.) If a straight person had asked Phillips to bake the cake for a same-sex wedding he would still have refused.
Shapiro is making a much broader point there, I think. He’s saying that a business owner (*any* business owner) should be able, in principle, to refuse service to a person merely because he or she is black, gay, etc (presumably even arbitrarily or varying day by day depending on the direction of the wind). I believe he’s buttressing his point about government non-intervention—so much so that *even* such and such should be the case. Of course he follows it with a distinction between how that ought to be legally permissible, even though he finds it morally wrong, because he thinks capitalism is a better remedy to this sort of discrimination than any government-imposed solution. If I recall reading the article correctly, I think he used the example of Jim Crow being made law in the south (maybe I’m misremembering).
"That doesn’t mean I agree morally with the choices people make about whom to serve – I think it’s idiotic not to bake a cake for a gay person, a black person, a Jew, or whomever."
ReplyDeletePhillips refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Big difference, and Shapiro really ought to know better. (Actually, I'm sure he does know better; he was just being careless here, but it still matters.) If a straight person had asked Phillips to bake the cake for a same-sex wedding he would still have refused.
Shapiro is making a much broader point there, I think. He’s saying that a business owner (*any* business owner) should be able, in principle, to refuse service to a person merely because he or she is black, gay, etc (presumably even arbitrarily or varying day by day depending on the direction of the wind). I believe he’s buttressing his point about government non-intervention—so much so that *even* such and such should be the case. Of course he follows it with a distinction between how that ought to be legally permissible, even though he finds it morally wrong, because he thinks capitalism is a better remedy to this sort of discrimination than any government-imposed solution. If I recall reading the article correctly, I think he used the example of Jim Crow being made law in the south (maybe I’m misremembering).
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree he was making that broader point. It's just that he made it poorly, by using the specific example of refusing to bake a cake.
ReplyDelete