  It seems that, for Watson and Hartley, the decisive consideration in the bake shop/wedding vendor cases is not a matter of causal effects on society but rather of how persons are treated in the public sphere, where citizens owe one another treatment as free and equal persons. Watson and Hartley regard the bake shop and all other commercial enterprises that offer goods and services to the general public as belonging to the public sphere, and they contend that the denial of services on grounds of sexual orientation violates what citizens owe one another in that sphere, because such a denial constitutes treating citizens in same-sex partnerships as inferior to citizens in heterosexual ones. 