When Freedoms Collide

 I have sympathy for those in the wedding business who are discomfited by same sex marriage. Seriously I do. I mean, who I marry is nobody else's business, sure. But if my business is planning other people's weddings, I wouldn't be happy at being required to plan weddings I didn't approve of. It's easy to say "Suck it up and do it." But is that fair? Particularly when the issue is one of sincere religious beliefs.

On the one hand, wedding planners do weddings all the time that they don't approve of. Maybe its a shotgun wedding that they know is doomed to divorce. Maybe they know the groom is an abuser. Maybe it's an interracial marriage. It hasn't been that long that interracial marriages were even legal everywhere in the US. And before they were permitted, the ban was justified by a religious conviction that God had created the races and intended them to be separate.

Maybe one or both parties to the wedding are divorced. That's something that can contradict sincere religious beliefs. To a devout Catholic, there is no divorce, there can be no remarriage. This has been true longer than the Supreme Court has existed to rule about, but wedding planners have sucked it up and done it.

The case of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis should never have gone to trial. Plaintiff had no standing to sue, having suffered no harm. It was a hypothetical case: what if she were asked to design for a gay wedding? The reasons the courts don't take cases like this is its completely unclear what, exactly, has been decided. What, exactly, had Lorie Smith been asked to do? Well, nothing. So the details of why it is a problem are completely missing. Consider two possibilities:

Wedding A: George and Joe want to get married. They have an announcement they want posted online, but for whatever reason are intimidated by all the platforms to do that, so they bring their copy to Creative LLC and say: "Format this nicely and put up online." Now, certainly, there is creative work to do in designing such a thing, and even though Creative is not generating any verbal content they are engaged in a rudimentary art. What harm do they suffer for doing this? I find it highly unlikely that anyone would see that website and interpret it as an endorsement by the designer. Designers design all kinds of things. Designers are never asked to approve of the people for whom they design.All you have to do is pick a nice font and arrange the words nicely. Suck it up.

Wedding B: Mary and Sue want to get married. They want to have a website that celebrates their union. Lots of photos, graphics, etc. And they want a page expresses their love for each other, and the meaning of marriage. Could she write up the story of how we met? Maybe a poem! Here, I have more sympathy, because they designer is being asked to generate specific content expressing certain ideas. The right thing to do might be to say, "I don't know if I'm the best person to help with this. Because of my own views of marriage, I might find it difficult to give you what you want." Whether there would be grounds to outright refuse, I don't know, but frankly, if I were Mary and Sue, I wouldn't want this person to do this service for me. Moreover, do people actually ask for such things? This is why the court normally doesn't rule on "speculative harm."

Exactly what the Supreme Court has considered grounds for refusal is not clear, which is why this case should never have been heard. One could interpret it to mean that if I oppose gay marriage on religious grounds, I can refuse to provide any service to a gay wedding. Flower arranging. Hall rental. Limo service. Dish washing. If it goes this way, then it is likely to be  difficult to hold gay weddings in some areas of the country. Since people have the option to refuse, they may feel compelled to refuse: if 90% of your business will boycott you if you provide service to the other 10%, And if that happens, then there is real, material harm to Americans. Granted, this community lock-out of wedding services is entirely speculative, but I hear the Supreme Court is willing to rule on speculation these days. ;)

Schrödinger's Trousers

 In Science class today we looked at genetics, and I was trying to stress that genetics are not destiny. Genes don't make you smart all by themselves, but they can make it more likely that you will be smarter. One of my students tried to make a joke about Schrödinger's Cat, but couldn't quite make it work. Then we got onto the subject of transgender. I made the point that gender (as opposed to sex) was a social concept. 

My student replied, "Well, you see, I have dangly bits between my legs, and I don't have dangly bits in front of my chest."

Said I, "Maybe so. But if you think about it, you don't actually know what bits I have between my legs."

His eyes got so wide you could have driven a truck through them.

"I present as male, you treat me as male, I am male. That's social gender."

"Oh."

Opportunities like this one just cannot be passed by: "It's kind of the opposite of Schrödinger's Cat. Until you open up the trousers and look, it's whatever  you say it is."