Freedom for Dummies

It seems wingnuts cannot grasp why a business owner may not refuse to make a standard wedding cake for a gay wedding but may refuse to make a cake with a homophobic message.  The Colorado Civil Rights Division says so, anyway.

In his complaint, Jack claimed Silva discriminated against him “based on my creed.”

Colorado Civil Rights Division argued in its Friday ruling that Silva did not discriminate against Jack because she offered to bake the cake, and only refused to write the messages by which she was offended.

Jack is the founder of the Worldview Academy, a camp that teaches “Christians to think and live in accord with a biblical worldview.”

Of course he is.

Elsewhere, religionista Rick Santorum recently said:

If you’re a print shop and you are a gay man, should you be forced to print ‘God Hates Fags’ for the Westboro Baptist Church because they hold those signs up? Should the government—and this is really the case here — should the government force you to do that? This is about the government coming in and saying, “No, we’re going to make you do this.” And this is where I think we just need some space to say let’s have some tolerance, be a two-way street.

Sally Kohn responds,

There are two problems with Santorum’s reasoning. The first is that a printer doesn’t have to make such signs, under any law, because refusing to do so is not discrimination in any legally prohibited sense. A print shop can also refuse to print a poster that says, for instance, “F*ck Rick Santorum,” either because it disagrees with the language or the sentiment. Both are entirely legally permissible decisions any business can rightfully make.

But let’s say the printer is asked to make a communion sign or a gay wedding sign. In this case—especially in states that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation as well as religion—refusing to print such a sign would indeed be illegal. The government isn’t forcing that business to do anything other than follow the law. Which is what we expect of all businesses, equally.

Josh Marshall is more succinct.

If you ask a baker to bake a cake that says “God hates gays” and they refuse, that’s not an imposition on your religion — unless you’re a complete moron.

Yes, that’s the catch, isn’t it?

If you won’t send the same floral arrangement to a gay wedding as a straight wedding, that’s a problem. On the other hand, if just hypothetically, a lesbian couple wanted an elaborate floral arrangement symbolizing a graphic sex act, yeah, I think the florist can turn you down, just as I imagine it’s obvious the florist could turn down a hetero couple in a comparable situation.

Of course, grasping this requires some skill at critical thinking. So righties will continue to not get it.

Pay Attention: There’s a Drought in California

Yesterday after Sunday service at the Zen Center while people were milling about with tea and cookies, I overheard someone mention the drought in California. Oh, there’s a drought in California? a young man replied, politely, with the same tone of voice one might use to say  Oh, you put pickle juice in tuna salad? Or, oh, Thanksgiving is on the 26th this year?

I’m sure lots of people not in California don’t know there’s a drought in California, but the Zen Center tends to draw an ecologically hip crowd of college-educated people who refuse to use plastic shopping bags and who compost food scraps for eventual use in some community garden. Or I assume that’s what they’re doing with the compost, although maybe they’re shipping it to poor farmers in Iowa. It occurs to me that Brooklyn could generate enough compost to cover Iowa every year, if it tried hard enough.

Yes, peeps, there’s a drought in California. Pay attention.

There’s an article in today’s New York Times that ought to be alarming the stuffing out of all of us.

As a drilling frenzy unfolds across the Central Valley, California’s agricultural heartland, the consequences of the overuse of groundwater are becoming plain to see.

In some places, water tables have dropped 50 feet or more in just a few years. With less underground water to buoy it, the land surface is sinking as much as a foot a year in spots, causing roads to buckle and bridges to crack. Shallow wells have run dry, depriving several poor communities of water.

Scientists say some of the underground water-storing formations so critical to California’s future — typically, saturated layers of sand or clay — are being permanently damaged by the excess pumping, and will never again store as much water as farmers are pulling out.

“Climate conditions have exposed our house of cards,” said Jay Famiglietti, a NASA scientist in Pasadena who studies water supplies in California and elsewhere. “The withdrawals far outstrip the replenishment. We can’t keep doing this.”

California really does supply the majority of the fruits, vegetables and grains we eat in the U.S., and while new food suppliers could be found seems to me there could be additional cost. The loss of California as a food-producing powerhouse could have wide-ranging effects, on the economy as much on in our diets.

And it’s not just California. Aquifers in the Midwest, the Great Plains especially, are running dry, also, which could affect corn and cattle production. Probably will affect them, actually. Fracking doesn’t help.  Charles Pierce wrote in 2011:

Make no mistake. You screw with the Ogallala Aquifer and you screw with this nation’s heartbeat. Twenty percent of the irrigated farmland in the United States depends upon it. Pumping the water from it is all that has kept the Dust Bowl from coming back, year after year. Any damage to it fundamentally changes the lives of the people who depend on it, their personal economies, the overall national economy, and what we can grow to feed ourselves. Absent the aquifer, and the nation’s breadbasket goes back to being a prairie, vast grasslands that the people who first crossed them referred to as a desert. You end up with dry-land corn and some dry-land wheat. And the aquifer is far easier to empty than it is to fill. The technology to fully exploit it has existed only since the 1950’s, and portions of it are already dangerously low. It won’t be fully recharged until the next Ice Age.

Let’s just say we aren’t making smart decisions about resources these days. I doubt most people know this is happening. We should be paying attention.