IV. Argument Analysis — An Argument in the Wild [10 pts) 12. Thefollowing is an excerpt fmm a New York Times op-ed by David Brooks. It contains an argument Analyze this argument and break it down into its premises and Conclusion

IV. Argument Analysis — An Argument in the Wild [10 pts) 12. Thefollowing is an excerpt fmm a New York Times op-ed by David Brooks. It contains an argument Analyze this argument and break it down into its premises and Conclusion
“Five years ago, Charlie Craig and David Mullins walked into a
bakery in a strip mall in Lakewood, Colo, to ask about a cake for
their wedding. The baker, Jack Phillips, replied: “I’ll make you
birthday cakes, shower Cakes, cookies, brownies. I just can’t make
a cake for a sameesex wedding. At this point, Craig and Mullins had
two possible courses of action, the neighborly and the legal. The
neighborly course would have been to use this sit-tuition as a
community-building moment. That means understanding the
concrete circumstance he}: were in. The legal course, by contrast,
was to take the problem out of the neighborhood and throw it into
the court system. The legal course has some advantages. You can
use state power, ultimately the barrel of a gun, to compel people to
do what you think is right. There are clearly many oases in which
the legal course is the right response [Brown v. Board ofEducation),
But the legal course has some disadvantages. It is inherently
adversarial. It takes what could be a conversation and turns it into
a confrontation. It is dehumanizing. It ends persuasion and relies
on the threat of state coercion. It is elitist. It takes a. situation that
could be addressed concretely on the ground and throws it up, as
this one now has been, to the Supreme Court, where it will be
decided by a group of Harvard and Yale law grads. Most important,
it is abstract. The situation between Phillips and Craig and Mullins
was a highly specific event involving three persons. But the state
doesn‘t see particularity and it doesn’t think personalistically. The
state seeks to create uniform, universal law. So the legal process
simplifies, depersonalizes and ahstracts. This case, which goes to
oral argument on Tuesday, is now revolving around an arbitrary
argument over whether baking is more like an expressive profession
like being an artist or a commercial profession like being a limo
driver.”