More on the Indiana debate

Someone made a good point on an Internet post - what if we were talking about a more participatory role than baking?  What if the photographer, the DJ, or for that matter the priest, had objections to the wedding based on religious grounds?  Should a priest have the right to refuse to marry two people?  Should a photographer have the right to refuse to take pictures? Should a DJ have the right to refuse to play at the reception?

These are mostly self-solving questions - generally speaking, no gay couple would involve people in such roles unless those people were comfortable with serving in them; that said, we said the same thing about the bakery question, that no gay couple would want a homophobe to make their wedding cake, and then it happened. 

The problem is, I think, that sometimes your options are limited (perhaps by distance, perhaps by money, perhaps by social constructs such as a family member knowing the person, etc.) and you don't have a choice who you turn to for these services.

In the case of the photographer, it may be difficult for him or her to take pictures of the couple kissing if they're gay and the photographer thinks their orientation is sinful.  For the photographer, it'd be akin to seeing someone stealing and not doing anything to stop it.

If it was me (if I somehow developed both homophobia and the ability to take good pictures), I would tell the couple that I have these concerns and doubted my ability to take good pictures as a result.  They would probably not pick me.  But if they did, could I go through with it, or would I be willing to risk the social and potentially legal ramifications of turning them down?

It gets complicated somewhat if we add additional weird situations into the mix: What if a wedding for another group (not a gay one necessarily) would involve additional things that are morally objectionable to the photographer, like an orgy?  It's not inconceivable that a group of swingers, for instance, might hold a private wedding ceremony and make that a core feature of the ceremony.  Should they request the services of a photographer, would it be acceptable for the photographer to turn it down?

These are difficult questions, and ones which I don't think our current debate is complex enough to handle.

If we think back a bit, though, we see that people had moral objections to serving blacks.  Those objections were completely unfounded (as are the current ones to homosexuality, imho) by our modern standards, but the apologies for those positions were elucidated in great detail.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the one that required businesses to serve without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.  Adding "sexual orientation" to this wouldn't necessitate adding exceptions for other crazy things - even if the orgy wedding described above was part of a religious ceremony.  That is, you can still turn down things based on the activities present at the ceremony, just not on the basis of the people themselves (That is, "Yes, I will photograph your wedding, so long as it doesn't involve an orgy.")

This leads back to the gay kiss, though - could you turn down the wedding for something as relatively innocuous as a kiss?  I think we can apply the "what do we expect to see in public" test to that - we don't allow sex in public, but we do allow kissing.  You are not protected from seeing a kiss based on our laws.  At some point in your life, you will see gay people kissing.  As a result, I think it's unreasonable to expect a legal protection from that in your line of work, too.