I don't think the issue was selling a cake, it was decorating a wedding cake -- which is a piece of artwork. So they were commissioning a piece of art that would violate the baker's deeply held religious beliefs, and they were going to put it on display to rub his nose in it, so to speak. If they had asked for a plain cake and he refused service, then maybe they would have a legitimate case.
Do you really want artists being forced by the government to produce works they find deeply offensive? How about a poem romanticizing the Holocaust? And force a Jewish poet to write it? (I think that's an apt analogy) And it better be good!!
This "artwork not product" argument is pretty good. I have to ask if you choked when you were typing "deeply held religious beliefs" though. The baker has deep political convictions under a thin veneer of religiosity, at best.
The flaw in the argument is that I find it very unlikely that a survey of the bakery's previous customers would return a whole lot of "oh, yes, they made it clear that we were commissioning artwork, not buying a product" over "they are in the business of selling cakes, and we bought one...is there some question here?" Basically the same breakdown in the case as when the drugstore on the corner says "we didn't refuse him service because he was black, we refused service because he was wearing sandals that violated our safety policy" and you can provide an actual parade of white customers in similar sandals making purchases with no questions asked.
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Moving on, since we are now in an actual thread on the topic, I have frequent conversations with my pastor regarding the hazards of 'ranking the sins.' I find that the deeply political with thin veneers of religion do this actively and shamelessly, but almost everyone is prone to it if they aren't vigilant. This is the typical ranking:
Minor or petty sins: these are the ones the person doing the ranking is routinely asking forgiveness for in a somewhat casual fashion. In my case I make a pretty good stand for "it says not to bear false witness against another, and stretching a few details to make a more interesting story isn't 'false witness,' so if it is lying and a sin it isn't like a terrible one."
Major sins: these are usually considered to be 'the big ten,' plus a handful of subsidiaries that are generally obvious derivatives, such as "I didn't kill him, I just beat him senseless" probably should be covered in a subsection, like commandment 6.1(a) or something. People are usually smug about having dodged most of these so they feel good even when they are admitting to a lot of their own brands of "petty" sins. Problem is that frequently their "clean slate" is more a lack of ability than any virtue on their part. "Well, *I* have never committed adultery" doesn't carry much weight coming from someone who looks like the underside of a snail and smells worse.
Abominations: these, almost invariably, are sins that the person doing the ranking has not only never done, but they have the convenient advantage
that they never wanted too anyway. Like when you meet the guy that thinks 'Do not covet thy neighbor's wife' is probably the most important commandment if you follow him to his house you will find out that he didn't even know that his neighbor the forest ranger was married, he thought the guy had brought home Smokey the Bear. And of course the average straight churchgoer is always willing to call a man lying with another man an unforgivable abomination and probably the worst sin of them all.
Here's the thing...sin is sin, and we all suffer from being sinful. The gospel doesn't say that Christ was crucified as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of
some sins, and some are okay, and others beyond his reach. Sin is sin, and the only ones I need to worry about are my own...whether I
could convince myself that they are 'petty' or not.
