Re: Eight Day Apatheist
>Seriously, isn't it time we stopped privileging certain people's "beliefs" over the law and the Constitution, regardless of how "sincerely" or "strongly" held those beliefs might be?
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
Oh wait... it doesn't conflict with the constitution and it is the law.
Still, we don't want laws which reflect what the people want. Down with democracy and make what I believe the law for everyone!
Despite the popular interpretation and cheap publicity for EMC, I'm not sure the law works as stated. There also seems to be a strange conflation of "the law" and "what is good."
There is a conceptual difference between practise and thought. Selling a cake to Muslim is fine with most people. Selling a cake with the text, "Every Woman Must Wear a Burka" might be something not everyone wants to do. The Indianna law protects that choice. You don't want to make a cake which says, "God hates fags"? The Indianna law protects that choice.
Rather than worry about hypothetical religions, why not see how the law works in practise? If someone uses the law, publicise how they used it. Do you want to see if people really believe in their religion or if they are just being nasty? Take a look at at the instances in the UK where someone has gone into an obviously christian cafe and then gone wailing to the police because the the scrolling texts on the wall "offended" them. The police essentially shut the business down. That's probably bad legislation. It certainly isn't freedom of religion or speech. Do you really think those things should only apply to the majority opinion? Then there is the couple running a B&B who would only provide beds to married couples. They didn't just pull out of a cheap trade show and save themselves a bit of cash to protect their religious practise, they closed their entire business because the legal requirements of being in business would force them to become an enabler of sexual practises they believe to be wrong. That's how you tell the difference between someone who really believes something and someone making idiotic spaghetti monster quips. Do you want to compare religion with racism? How many white-supremacists are trying to get black people to join them, to socialise together? How many racists would be willing to lose their income source rather than enable practises they disagree with.
Is EMC willing to do that? Will they or Apple not sell to the Vatican because of what the Vatican stands for or is this just better publicity than $30k could buy in the press?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
