Justices’ ruling favors baker over gay couple
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday sided with a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, but it left undecided whether a business owner’s religious beliefs or freespeech rights can justify refusing some services to gay people.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 7-2 decision, relied on narrow grounds, saying a state commission had violated the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom in ruling against the baker, Jack Phillips.
“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” Kennedy wrote. “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”
The Supreme Court’s decision, which turned on the commission’s asserted hostility to religion, reaffirmed protections for gay rights and left open the possibility that other cases raising similar issues could be decided differently.
“The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts,” Kennedy
wrote, “all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.”
Such a case could come soon: The court is set to consider this week whether to review a Washington state Supreme Court decision that a florist could not legally decline to provide flowers to a same-sex wedding there.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch joined the majority opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas sided with the majority but indicated he would have ruled for Phillips on free-speech grounds.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented.
In a conference call with reporters, Phillips thanked the court for recognizing “the injustice that the government inflicted on me.” He said that “tolerance is a two-way street” and added, “If we want to have freedom for ourselves, we have to extend it to others with whom we disagree about important issues like the meaning of marriage.”
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who in September joined a 20-state coalition in filing an amicus brief that called for the court to protect Phillips’ freedom of speech, welcomed Monday’s decision.
“Tolerance is a two-way street, and in this case, we found balance,” Rutledge said in a statement. “Today’s decision is a big win for religious liberty across the country.”
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., echoed that view.
“The Supreme Court has rightly decided that open hostility to religion has no place in a free country’s government and that people of faith deserve full protection under the law, no less than any other citizen,” he said in a statement posted on his website Monday.
But James Esseks of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the couple at the center of the dispute, pointed to Kennedy’s protective language about gay citizens and the “general rule” that religious and other objections “do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny … equal access to goods and services.”
“The bakery may have won the battle, but it has lost the war,” Esseks told reporters.
REFUSED TO SERVE
The case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, No. 16-111, arose from a brief encounter in 2012, when David Mullins and Charlie Craig visited Phillips’ bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop, in Lakewood, Colo. The two men were going to be married in Massachusetts, and they were looking for a wedding cake for a reception in Colorado.
Phillips turned them down, saying he would not use his talents to convey a message of support for same-sex marriage at odds with his religious faith. Mullins and Craig said they were humiliated by Phillips’ refusal to serve them, and they filed a complaint with Colorado’s civil-rights commission, saying that Phillips had violated a state law barring discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Mullins and Craig won their case before the Colorado civil-rights commission and in the state courts.
The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that Phillips’ freespeech rights had not been violated. The court added that people seeing the cake would not understand Phillips to be making a statement and that he remained free to say what he liked about same-sex marriage in other settings.
Gay-rights groups argued that same-sex couples are entitled to equal treatment from businesses open to the public. A ruling for Phillips, they said, would undermine the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling guaranteeing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage and would mark the unions of gay couples as second-class marriages unworthy of legal protection.
Phillips contended that dual guarantees in the First Amendment — free speech and the free exercise of religion — protect him against Colorado’s public accommodations law, which requires businesses to serve customers equally regardless of “disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry.”
Though the Colorado case was mostly litigated on freespeech grounds, Kennedy’s opinion barely discussed the issue. Instead, he focused on what he said were flaws in the proceedings before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Members of the commission, he wrote, had acted with “clear and impermissible hostility” to sincerely held religious beliefs.
One commissioner in particular, Kennedy wrote, had crossed the line in saying that “freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination
throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust.”
Kennedy wrote that “this sentiment is inappropriate for a commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law.”
In dissent, Ginsburg said that a few stray remarks were not enough to justify a ruling in Phillips’ favor.
“What prejudice infected the determinations of the adjudicators in the case before and after the commission?” Ginsburg asked. “The court does not say.”
But Ginsburg said that “there is much in the court’s opinion with which I agree,” quoting several passages reaffirming gay-rights protections.
“Colorado law,” Kennedy wrote in one, “can protect gay persons, just as it can protect other classes of individuals, in acquiring whatever products and services they choose on the same terms and conditions as are offered to other members of the public.”
But within the court’s seven-member majority, there were differences that could affect future cases.
Gorsuch, along with Alito, indicated they would have been willing to go further. “In this country, the place of secular officials isn’t to sit in judgment of religious beliefs, but only to protect their free exercise,” he wrote.
He added: “It is no more appropriate for the United States Supreme Court to tell Mr. Phillips that a wedding cake is just like any other — without regard to the religious significance his faith may attach to it — than it would be for the Court to suggest that for all persons sacramental bread is just bread or a kippah is just a cap.”
Kagan, joined by Breyer, said Gorsuch was wrong.
“A wedding cake does not become something different whenever a vendor like Phillips invests its sale to particular customers with ‘religious significance,’” Kagan wrote. “As this Court has long held, and reaffirms today, a vendor cannot escape a public accommodations law because his religion disapproves selling a product to a group of customers, whether defined by sexual orientation, race, sex, or other protected trait.”
She referenced a 1968 decision that said a barbecue restaurant owner must serve black customers even though he claimed that his religion did not embrace racial equality.
Information for this article was contributed by Adam Liptak of
The New York Times and Robert Barnes of The Washington Post.