Case of the Christian baker and secular empire can be instructive
There are fine constitutional lawyers who can argue back and forth about the Masterpiece Cakeshop case the Supreme Court heard last week, which will determine whether a Christian baker can decline to make a same-sex couple’s wedding cake. The court’s decision will either limit anti-discrimination law or limit First Amendment protections, so it’s not surprising that you can find deeply footnoted arguments on both sides.
I’m not going to make a constitutional argument for the baker’s rights. I’m going to make a political argument for why our country would be better off if he were left alone to bake his cakes.
The United States has the rules of a democratic republic but, increasingly, the cultural divisions of a sprawling Old World empire.
As a conservative Catholic who works in a liberal milieu, I watched this happen after Obergefell v. Hodges. For its opponents, the same-sex marriage ruling was less frightening for what it did than for what they feared might follow: a sweeping legal campaign against the sexual revolution’s dissidents, in which conservative believers would be prodded out of various occupations, while their schools and hospitals and charities would be fined and taxed and regulated and de-accredited to death.
And liberals who felt ascendant in the Obama years simply couldn’t accept this fear as something to be managed and assuaged; to them, it was either ridiculous alarmism or a cloak for bigotry. What Rod Dreher called “the law of merited impossibility” dominated the liberal mind: Religious conservatives were worrying about attacks on their institutions that would never arrive, and when the attacks did arrive, they obviously deserved it.
Which in turn encouraged religious conservatives to vote rather desperately for a celebrity strongman named Donald Trump. At which point the roles reversed, and suddenly it was a certain kind of right-winger who couldn’t understand why blacks, Hispanics and Muslims might feel threatened by the new president, why Trump’s rhetoric might make them fear for their very safety, why causes conservatives regarded as procedurally neutral exercises in enforcing laws — immigrant roundups, strict voter ID laws — were experienced as acts of white-identitarian aggression.
This kind of cycle of incomprehension and aggression tends to destroy republics if it isn’t broken, if leaders can’t compromise to maintain civic peace, if partisans can’t imagine how the world looks in communities vastly different from their own.
I’ve written before that one hope is a president who behaves like a good emperor, who acts to reassure threatened-feeling out-groups in a way that Barack Obama failed to do and Trump is incapable of even attempting.
But Anthony Kennedy is also an imperial figure, and he has a chance to rule like a good emperor in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, to balance his Obergefell decision with a panic-defusing counterpoint.
Liberalism won the same-sex marriage battle. Religious conservatism isn’t going away. We all have to find a way to live together. That goal requires some compromise and magnanimity. Here is an opportunity: Please, for the sake of the country, leave the baker alone.