Cake by Force

Midnight, the bus is going
Try to sleep
Was it ever so cold
Or ever so clear
This blanket's for you
--The Apartments

Recent poll finds Americans split on requiring business owners to serve same sex couples. The poll coincides with an appellate court ruling against a Colorado bakery owner who refused to sell a wedding cake.

The baker argued that serving gay couples violated his religious beliefs, and that his right to operate according to his religious beliefs is protected by the First Amendment.

The court ruled that because the baker's doors were open to the public he is not permitted to discriminate between who he serves and who he doesn't serve--an argument presumably grounded in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The baker is right. Both this ruling and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (specifically Titles 2 and 7) clearly violate the First Amendment. They force business owners to do things that they might not want to do on religious grounds. Whether those grounds are legitimate in the eyes of others makes no difference. The First Amendment's verbiage is clear on this point.

More broadly, this ruling challenges each individual's natural right to peacefully discriminate as they fit. In a free society, people are free to associate with whom they want--whether those associations be for commercial or leisurely purposes. If a law forces business owners to accomodate people that they do not want to associate with, then those business owners are being forced to surrender property and associated decision rights to others.

This amounts to unequal treatment under the law, as government is forcibly limiting the pursuits of some for the benefit of others.