Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Printsmith continues to conflate public accommodation businesses with non-public accommodation businesses either being deliberately obtuse or intellectual dishonest.

Public accommodation laws date back to early English common law and are defined, both under common law and by statutory law as public and private entities that are used by the public. This include businesses such as retail stores, rental establishments and service establishments, as well as educational institutions, recreational facilities and service centers. Thus a business that invites the public in general into their place of business and offers products as well as offering services. Masterpiece bakery invited the public in general into their business, to purchase and consume baked goods as well as offering to the public in general services such as baking custom wedding cakes, just as a restaurant will offer to prepare a meal according to their customer tastes. Masterpiece Bakery is clearly and definitely a retail store, which clearly and unequivocally makes it a public accommodation as defined by Colorado law.

Most contractors on the other hand are not considered "retail stores", nor are their businesses open to the public in general. Thus they may not be public accommodations. However, if they do meet the definition of public accommodation, then they too will be subject to not denying their services solely on the basis of skin color or sexual orientation.


Just because Printsmith believes that bigots should be able to deny the services that they offer to the public in general to others solely based on their skin color or sexual orientation does not make it so. Nor does the 13th amendment "protect" such bigots, as the Supreme Court explicitly ruled.

ScienceChic wrote: There have been some interesting scenarios tossed out here, thank you for the mental exercise Gents. There seems to be some fuzziness between discrimination that is prohibited based on employment and based on contract work. I haven't spent a lot of time researching this, and I'm certainly no lawyer, but here's what I've found so far.

home.ubalt.edu/shapiro/rights_course/Chapter8text.htm

VIII. PROHIBITING PRIVATE DISCRIMINATION

As we have seen in an earlier chapter, the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits most discrimination on the basis of race and gender (and also alienage and national origin), but only when practiced by the government. The Supreme Court held in The Civil Rights Cases in 1883, that Congress did not have the power under the Fourteenth Amendment to prohibit discrimination practiced by private parties. Similarly, it would be illegal for a state to discriminate on the basis of a person’s religious belief, but this prohibition under the First Amendment (which was made applicable to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment), would not apply to private conduct.

Therefore, as late as 1960, an employer could refuse to hire a woman, a restaurant owner could refuse service to a black person, and a landlord could refuse to rent an apartment to a Jewish person. Although individual states were free, using their general police power, to prohibit these kinds of discrimination, very few had done so. Starting in the 1960’s, however, Congress has been able to prohibit many forms of private discrimination using its power under other sections of the Constitution.

The three main sources of power that Congress has used to this effect have been: its power under the Thirteenth Amendment (which prohibited slavery), its power over the federal purse, and its power to regulate interstate commerce. Congress’s powers under each of these sections is different, both in terms of who may be prohibited from discriminating and also what kind of discrimination may be prohibited. Some of the statutes passed by Congress under each of these powers have overlapped, so that certain conduct is controlled by several different statutes. There are also certain kinds of private discrimination which Congress either may not constitutionally reach, or has chosen not to. The next sections will examine the coverage of various statutes passed under each of these powers.

Minnesota has a Contract-Based Discrimination Law in place, I can't find if Colorado or any other state has something similar.
Contract-Based Discrimination for *Some* Independent Contractors Under the MHRA
By Grant T. Collins on July 1, 2010

We all know that the Minnesota Human Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination. However, a little-known provision in that law also bans contract-based discrimination, which makes it illegal for a person engaged in a trade or business:

… to intentionally refuse to do business with, to refuse to contract with, or to discriminate in the basic terms, conditions, or performance of the contract because of a person’s race, national origin, color, sex, sexual orientation, or disability, unless the alleged refusal or discrimination is because of a legitimate business purpose.

And under what pretense would a person be able to refuse to provide a cake with the scripture passages describing homosexuality as an abomination adorning a representation of the Bible under these statutes SC? None. And that is precisely the problem when a society starts attempting to legislate equality of outcome.

Either both bakers must labor in violation of their own beliefs and their own will or neither baker can be forced to labor in violation of their own beliefs and their own will. That is the only scenario under which it can be said that all are equal before the law.

Either we must allow the bigots to express their bigotry (ie the KKK marching through the Jewish or black neighborhood) in order to protect our own rights or we succumb to the notion that natural rights do not exist at all, at which point we become subjects of the government once again.

What a reasonable person would do at this point is to consider the possible effects in reality of PrintSmith's lay interpretation of the law. A bigoted baker would offer minimal, substandard goods for sale as they are while requiring anything else to receive at least a minimal amount of customization.

www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news...o-make-anti-gay-cake

ScienceChic wrote: Either we must allow the bigots to express their bigotry (ie the KKK marching through the Jewish or black neighborhood) in order to protect our own rights or we succumb to the notion that natural rights do not exist at all, at which point we become subjects of the government once again.

Exactly and well said. There is a very simple remedy if a business owner doesn't want to accommodate one's request. Go somewhere else where they will. If the business refuses to accommodate enough folks for whatever reasons or if enough folks decide not to patronize that business for whatever reasons, the business will not be around for very long. Pretty simple.

You know, does all of this mean that smokers should be a protected class?

SC didn't write that and it wasn't accurate or well said. How many public accommodations that refused to serve blacks failed in the south before the civil rights era?

Most of the laws required segregation prior to the civil rights era Brandon. It wasn't necessarily that a proprietor of a restaurant thought that blacks should be served in a separate area (though I am sure that many did), it was that the laws in place at the time required them to do so. The law required blacks to give up seats at the front of the bus - it was the government itself that was treating citizens differently from one another based on skin color and it is this that violated the Constitution. A government school must treat all students the same, it is not allowed to draw distinctions between them. That isn't true of private schools at all, is it. They are allowed to draw distinctions. A private school may be all male, or all female - it is allowed to discriminate based on sex. When the government inserts itself into violating the unalienable right to associate according to the desires of the individual person it must have a compelling reason to do so and their remedy must be the least intrusive one possible.

There is no compelling reason to force a baker to labor in violation of their own will, their own principles, their own conscious, to create a custom made cake for another individual. And let us not fool ourselves, a wedding cake is nothing but a custom made cake. There isn't a baker I know of who bakes one in the hopes that some desperate soul is going to come walking through their front door wanting to purchase it. It is something that doesn't exist in the real world until such time as a baker and a person wanting a wedding cake sit down and make a contract between them for that cake to be baked and decorated to the exact specifications of the customer. The contract specifies the date the cake is to be ready, how many layers it will have, the type(s) of cake in each layer, whether it will or won't contain puddings or other fillings, what color or colors the frosting decorating the cake will be, the manner and style of the accents, if any, and the time said cake is to be delivered and where on the agreed upon date. That is a contract between a business and a customer, not a public accommodation. Should the cake not be ready, and correct with respect to the contract, the customer will seek redress in a civil court for, you guessed it, failure to fulfill the contract that was entered into to produce the cake. It's a contractual matter, not a public accommodation.

Let's list some other instances where a person is allowed to discriminate against a so-called protected class, shall we? A single woman wishes to rent a room in the house she occupies to raise her standard of living, or simply to be able to afford the mortgage after divorcing her husband. Is she allowed to refuse to rent that room to a black man because he's a black man? You bet your last shiny new Roosevelt fiat dime she is. She can refuse to rent it to a homosexual man, or a homosexual woman, as well. She could discriminate because of age if she didn't want an elderly person renting that room. In short there is no protected class in such circumstances irrespective of every law written about equal housing. That's the truth of the matter, isn't it Brandon.

Hooters can discriminate based on age or on gender when hiring wait staff even though both are protected classes under federal law. A club could refuse to hire a woman to be an attendant in a men's locker room, or a man to be an attendant in a woman's locker room, effectively discriminating based on sex. There are any number of instances where discrimination is permissible in our society Brandon.

The government can't force you to enter into a contract with anyone irrespective of whether that person is a member of a so-called protected class or not. Contracts, in order to be binding on both parties, must be voluntarily enjoined. Involuntary servitude is expressly prohibited by the Constitution and using the force of government to compel a baker to call into existence a custom, one off, made to order cake for another individual against the baker's will, against the baker's conscious, against the baker's principles, is nothing other than forcing the to bake that cake involuntarily.

PrintSmith wrote: A single woman wishes to rent a room in the house she occupies to raise her standard of living, or simply to be able to afford the mortgage after divorcing her husband. Is she allowed to refuse to rent that room to a black man because he's a black man? You bet your last shiny new Roosevelt fiat dime she is.

Wrong as usual. You've spent too many years, nay decades in your fantasy world.

Ask a lawyer and get back to me with your apology after speaking with them Brandon.

portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/progra...pp/FHLaws/yourrights

"The Fair Housing Act protects people from discrimination when they are renting, buying, or securing financing for any housing. The prohibitions specifically cover discrimination because of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability and the presence of children."

Not that a reasonable person would confuse renting a room with buying a cake, of course.