Timeline for Can a religious baker refuse service to an underage couple-to-be, in accordance with his deeply-held religious beliefs?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
31 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 18 at 12:45 | comment | added | gnasher729 | A wedding cake for two 66 year olds might very well be decorated differently. | |
| Dec 27, 2019 at 22:25 | comment | added | ruakh | @BenVoigt: I'm not sure why you suggest that. The objection to baking a wedding cake for two men, or two twenty-year-olds, relates to the wedding that it's for, not to any physical property of the cake. (Are you really claiming to believe that a wedding cake for two twenty-year-olds will be decorated differently than one for two twenty-one-year-olds?) | |
| Dec 27, 2019 at 21:51 | comment | added | Ben Voigt | @ruakh: You're missummarizing, though. The actual stance, as far as I can see, is "I wouldn't bake a cake with that decoration". "for that couple" is not even under consideration. It could be "for the purpose of throwing in the trash in front of a million Youtube viewers" and the baker would still refuse to make "that (decorated) cake" | |
| Dec 27, 2019 at 21:34 | comment | added | ruakh | @BenVoigt: I suspect that the reason that answerers haven't picked up on your distinction is that it isn't as important and relevant, from a legal standpoint, as you assume. (Presumably "I wouldn't bake a cake for that couple no matter who asked me to!" and "I wouldn't bake a cake for that couple no matter who they wanted it for!" can trigger the same sorts of discrimination laws.) | |
| Dec 27, 2019 at 15:14 | comment | added | Ben Voigt | @ruakh: Of course "ask a new question with the facts correct" should also involve an edit here, with a summary of why the original presentation is wrong and a link to the new question. And while it may be common on StackExchange at large to answer the question the asker should have stated, that appears not to be taking place on Law.SE, probably because the question does also have answers as asked even if the situation is unlikely to ever occur (because it is inconsistent with all the major political and religious views). | |
| Dec 26, 2019 at 21:41 | comment | added | ruakh | @BenVoigt: I note that your proposed fix, "abandon this [question] and ask a new one", also doesn't involve "correct[ing] the description" here. So your demands aren't entirely consistent. More broadly . . . it's very common on Stack Exchange sites that answerers understand the subject matter better than askers. This means that answers often have to clarify misconceptions in questions. You know this, and you're usually fine with it. Why is it bothering you so much this time? | |
| Dec 26, 2019 at 20:08 | comment | added | Ben Voigt | @ruakh: Being related to another case which is also described wrongly is no excuse for failing to correct the description. | |
| Dec 26, 2019 at 4:41 | comment | added | phoog | @SteveJessop those states that do allow minors to marry generally require a court to approve so the judge can ensure that there's no coercion. But judges are neither infallible nor universally ethical, and there seems to be no actual requirement in the law for the minor to consent. | |
| Dec 26, 2019 at 1:48 | comment | added | Steve Jessop | So, "even in the absence of their own consent" is not a statement of US law, it is a statement of part of the religious belief the questioner is asking about. | |
| Dec 26, 2019 at 1:30 | comment | added | Steve Jessop | @RossRidge: it appears that the questioner is asserting, as a matter of their own religious belief, that a child by definition cannot consent to marriage, and that in those 48 states the parent's consent therefore must substitute for that of the child. Of course this is not the law in the US, which asserts that under suitable circumstances a minor can consent to marriage (and indeed to many other things which legally require consent). | |
| Dec 26, 2019 at 0:52 | comment | added | Lightness Races in Orbit | You're not the one getting married. Make the dang cake. I guarantee that nothing in your religious text says you cannot make a cake, for someone else, as a job, that has some particular scribblings on it. | |
| Dec 26, 2019 at 0:00 | comment | added | ruakh | @BenVoigt: I think the question is fine as-is, since the OP explicitly refers to a similar case as the motivation for the question, and the two issues are obviously intertwined. If answerers think that the distinction is relevant to the answer, they should include that information in their answers. | |
| Dec 26, 2019 at 0:00 | answer | added | gnasher729 | timeline score: 0 | |
| Dec 25, 2019 at 7:03 | comment | added | Ben Voigt | @Krishna: Since you now recognize it is a question of electing not to perform a particular type of service no matter who the customer is, and not discrimination against a particular customer, the question needs a complete rewrite. Actually because there are already answers, you really need to abandon this one and ask a new one. It probably would help if you fill in a matrix with one dimension being what product (wedding cake vs birthday cake) and another axis being who the customer is (bride vs bride's mother) to clearly illustrate that the issue is not the age of the customer. | |
| Dec 25, 2019 at 1:51 | comment | added | Ross Ridge | @Krishna Just because the parent needs to consent to the marriage doesn't mean that the child doesn't also need to consent. The Wikipedia article you linked does not support your assertion that a child's willingness to get married is legally irrelevant. | |
| Dec 25, 2019 at 1:34 | comment | added | Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні | What if their religion says it's OK - perhaps even REQUIRED - but they HAVE to have a cake - and you're the only baker in town. Now you're discriminating against their religion. | |
| Dec 25, 2019 at 1:09 | comment | added | Krishna | @BobJarvis-ReinstateMonica I understand the difference between age of consent and age of marriage. The article I linked in the OP is about age of marriage, not age of consent, and my question is about age of marriage, not age of consent, so please take the question as written. I don't understand why the comments here seem to be changing the subject to age of consent when the question (and the link provided in the question itself) are clearly about age of marriage. | |
| Dec 25, 2019 at 1:08 | comment | added | Krishna | @cat40 No, the article I linked in the OP is about age of marriage, not age of consent. There has been no mix up. | |
| Dec 25, 2019 at 1:01 | comment | added | Krishna | @RossRidge The 48 states linked in the OP allow marriage of minors with parental consent. The child cannot consent, so their will is irrelevant, legally speaking. | |
| Dec 25, 2019 at 0:57 | comment | added | Krishna | @BenVoigt Good point, that's correct. I would refuse to let the bride's mother place the order because it is for a child marriage. | |
| Dec 25, 2019 at 0:56 | comment | added | Krishna | There is no confusion. Child marriage is legal in 48 states, meaning that in 48 states, a child can be married with the consent of his/her parent/guardian alone, irrespective of his/her own consent. This has nothing to do with age of sexual consent, though I'm not surprised people here are trying to obfuscate the issue. | |
| Dec 24, 2019 at 19:56 | comment | added | Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні | @Kirshna: just to make it clear: "age of consent" is the age at which a person is deemed to be legally competent to consent to sexual acts. This has little to do with "consent to marry another person", although if you agree to marry another person "sexual acts" are an implied part of marriage. | |
| Dec 24, 2019 at 19:51 | comment | added | cat40 | In accordance with @RossRidge 's comment, is it possible you mixed up age of consent with consenting to be married? | |
| Dec 24, 2019 at 19:01 | comment | added | Ross Ridge | You said that minors can marry "even in the absence of their own consent". What US state allows marriage in the absence of consent of one of the persons being married? | |
| Dec 24, 2019 at 17:09 | comment | added | Ben Voigt | Krishna this doesn't seem to be a case of "refusing service to the couple" because you'd also refuse to let the bride's mother place the order, correct? The issue is what is being ordered (a cake celebrating child marriage) and not who places the order. | |
| Dec 24, 2019 at 15:53 | answer | added | user6726 | timeline score: 4 | |
| Dec 24, 2019 at 14:52 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Dec 24, 2019 at 11:59 | comment | added | Paul Johnson | Just to be clear, the specific service in Masterpiece Cakeshop was the decoration of the cake, which would have required the baker to "speak" (in the form of cake decorations) a point of view which they disagreed with. If the gay couple had merely wished to purchase an undecorated or generically decorated cake then the 1st Amendment issue would not have existed. | |
| Dec 24, 2019 at 8:43 | answer | added | Greendrake | timeline score: 14 | |
| Dec 24, 2019 at 8:10 | answer | added | xuhdev | timeline score: 6 | |
| Dec 24, 2019 at 6:50 | history | asked | Krishna | CC BY-SA 4.0 |