I love the hysteria on this thread. For my suggestion that a shop owner follow the law and not discriminate regarding services he's advertised to provide, I've been called a pervert, a communist, and accused of being akin to Kim Jung-Il of North Korea. Meanwhile that suggestion has been compared to "servitude", and "celebration of tyranny" at the point of "government guns", and the slippery slope that will lead to the end of our inalienable rights.
C'mon, folks, all I saying is stay true to your word. You advertise wedding cakes, then bake wedding cakes. If you don't want to sell wedding cakes, then that's fine too. Why is the right to ignore the community's quite reasonable rules so highly prized? Why is the harm caused by arbitrary discrimination so blithely dismissed? Could it be because the white, straight, male Christians among us have never suffered such discrimination in their lives?
I have thus far refrained from commenting on this thread, but since you are still at it days later, I think you should be reminded that your version depends on telling the story starting in the middle:
The story goes like this:
From time immemorial not only in Christian cultures, but the world over, marriage has involved a man and a woman being given social (and later religious and legal) sanction to have sex, have children, stay together to raise their children. In Christian societies it has been see as blessed by God, in light of various remarks of Jesus in Christian Scripture, the protection offered it in the Old Covenant Law ("Thou shalt not commit adultery"), and the like.
Governments chose to regulate the institution (which is older than any government) for the benefit of society (e.g. so the parentage of orphans could be more easily ascertained, to suppress child marriage,...) and to encourage it as a socially beneficial institution (e.g. by according married couples rights vis-a-vis inheritance, by favorable tax status).
While this was the state of affairs, pious Christians went into business to also support the institution by, for instance, providing art works (hand lettered invitations, decorated cakes,...) or providing venues for weddings.
The government on the plea that its regulation of marriage constituted marriage, changed the definition of marriage to include things which Christians regard not only as not blessed, but as sinful. Now, the rules of the game having been changed in mid-game, all the pious Christians who ran businesses in support of weddings when they were the formation and celebration of marriage as understood by Christian civilization for centuries prior to that decision are to be put out of business because you and your ilk want to equate wishing to provide services for weddings as traditionally understood, but not for celebrations of the newly-government-redefined notion of "marriage" when what is being celebrated is in traditional Christian understanding immoral, with Jim Crow.
Your position makes the wall of separation between Church and State into a bulldozer-blade with the State driving it to scrape the Church out of society: just redefine terms so that the Church has no space and the State is supreme. One court decision, and hey presto! What had thirty years prior been a generally held moral precept becomes "bigotry" and "discrimination".
