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ChristianKl comments on [Link] Death with Dignity by Scott Adams - Less Wrong Discussion
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That's why the wedding cake example doesn't make sense in this context. You need special laws to regulate euthanasia.
The law that forces here is the Oregon Equality Act. It prevents businesses from discriminating. It's not a law that legislates gay marriage that's the issue.
If you want to have effective laws than you have to target the right law. If you try to fix things at the wrong spot you add additional complexity.
When it comes to doctors there are laws about malpractice that do force doctors to do certain things. I think malpractice laws do have a right to exist but they shouldn't be too restrictive on what doctors can do. I think euthanasia laws should be written in a way that doesn't make it malpractice to avoid applying euthanasia.
A law which says that a gay marriage has to be treated like a straight marriage in one particular way is a gay marriage law. The law is just being made piecemeal and not labelled with "Gay Marriage Law" in the title, but it's still a gay marriage law.
By the same token you could say it's a gun sales law as it forbids people from refusing to sell guns to gay people based on them being gay.
The original law isn't a marriage law, it's a gay marriage law. So you would have to describe your hypothetical as a "gay gun ownership law". But laws other than the one being invoked already allow gay people to own guns.
Furthermore, while you describe the original situation as refusing to do business based on being gay, it's not. It's refusing to do business based on it being about a gay marriage. If a straight person wanted a cake celebrating a gay wedding, they wouldn't be served either, and if a gay person wanted a cake for something else, they would; the refusal is based on the content of the message, not the identity of the customer.
You make a major mistake when you focus on the situation that the case is about instead of focusing on the law.
If you want feel free to argue, that the court made a mistake when it's treated the bakery as violating the prohibition of discriminating against gay people. Then your problem is not with the law but with the judge for interpreting the situation differently than you.
Other laws do allow gay people to own guns but a single gun salesman can refuse to serve a customer. There's no law that requires a gun salesman to serve every customer. This law prevents him from not selling him the gun because the customer is gay.
If you want to have a reasonable discussion about politics and which laws to pass, argue about the actual laws.
No, the relevant discussion is about the consequences of passing the laws, and if the consequence is that the judiciary will interpret it to mean something different from what it says, that's relevant to the discussion.
Note: part of the misunderstanding here may be that you will in a civil law country whereas the US is a common law country, and thus the judiciary here has a lot more power to interpret (or even make up) laws.
Law is law whether it is made by writing a statute or whether it is made by judicial fiat. If anything, the fact that the judge's ruling didn't match the law on the books makes it especially obvious that the judge is actually making law.
To have a productive discussion it's worthwhile to be able to clarify which political decisions one agrees with and which one accepts.
Do you think that the law itself is reasonable and it's just the judge who's the problem?
In practice, there is no "the law" which is separate from a judge's decisions, so that's a meaningless question.
That's only true if you don't care about law making. Societies that don't care about the laws on the books usually get pretty messed up.
Yes, and unfortunately in the contemporary US the idea that judges should base their decisions on what the law actually says is considered an extreme right wing position.