LGBTQ advocates criticize cake ruling
State Sen. Beth Bye said the U.S. Supreme Court’s gay wedding cake decision felt like a “punch in the gut.”
“My immediate reaction was just thinking of the lunch counters — because of who you are, you can be denied services,” the West Hartford Democrat said, referring to racial segregation in the pre-civil rights era.
Bye and her wife were the first gay couple to marry in Connecticut, after the state legalized samesex marriage in 2008. She and her wife view the courts as their protector, she said, but this time the courts let them down.
In a 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission
was hostile toward the religious beliefs of baker Jack Phillips who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
The ruling essentially left the big issue — whether religious beliefs can ever justify unequal treatment in the marketplace — postponed for a later day, said Emily Bazelon, a Yale Law School researcher who writes about women’s issues and gay rights.
In a “politically savvy ruling,” the courts said “we just think the Colorado civil rights commissioner didn’t speak with sufficient respect for religion,” Bazelon explained.
LGBTQ advocates who had hoped the court would resoundingly say that discrimination on the basis on sexual orientation is always unconstitutional were disappointed. Anthony Crisci, executive director of the Triangle Community Center, an LGBTQ center in Norwalk, said people were calling the center with questions all day.
“It’s kind of an indifferent decision that doesn’t advance LGBTQ rights one way or the other,” he said.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops rejoiced at the ruling.
Artists “deserve to have the freedom to express ideas — or to decline to create certain messages — in accordance with their deeply held beliefs,” the chairmen of the bishops’ group said in a statement.
Although its majority sided with the baker, the court reaffirmed existing protections for gay rights and left open the possibility that other cases raising similar issues could be decided differently.
Connecticut law protects LGBTQ individuals from discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation. The state was the third in the nation to legalize gay marriage, a step it took in 2008.
At the time, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. was the state’s attorney general and oversaw implementation of the legalization.
“This narrow ruling gets it wrong by allowing this shameful discriminatory act in Colorado to go unchecked,” Blumenthal said Monday. “But I agree with the Court where it explicitly affirms the right of LGBT Americans to be free from discrimination — a concept that shouldn’t even require debate.”
The Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities received 72 complaints on the basis of sexual orientation in the fiscal year 2017. The Triangle Community Center is regularly hears complaints that never get reported, however, Crisci said.
“The reality is in Fairfield County and in greater Connecticut and in the country, there are service providers who discriminate against LGBTQ people,” he said. “It’s still really hard to enforce those policies.”