Religious beliefs and gay wedding cakes

A letter about the refusal of a Colorado baker to provide a cake for a gay wedding stated that this was not “based on the customer being gay” but “because it’s against his religion” [“Mull these analogies in wedding-cake case,” Dec. 29].

The writer then made an analogy based on faulty logic, using examples that have nothing to do with religious doctrine. For example, he said that it would be the same as a black baker refusing to bake a cake for a KKK event.

A more apt analogy would be defending Muslim business owners refusing to serve women who enter the business unaccompanied by a male, or Evangelical bakers refusing to bake a cake for the wedding of a previously divorced person.

If such allowances were made for the religious beliefs of business owners in our country, where there are thousands of differing sects of multiple religions, discrimination would be rampant.

Businesses are licensed to serve the public. A prior Supreme Court decision, Bob Jones University v. United States, found that a member of a religion that believed blacks should not commingle with whites could lost its tax-exempt status for practicing racial discrimination.

If providing a legitimate service to any group of people is a violation of an owner’s beliefs, the owner should choose a business where such conflicts do not arise.

Lois Moylan, West Hempstead

The Dec. 29 letter about the cake baker drew an analogy between refusing to serve gay people and refusing to serve KKK members or anti-Semitic white supremacists.

This is a weak analogy because being a member of the two latter groups is a choice, but being gay is not.

Steven Siegel, Nesconset