Against being an anti-religious jerk
No, my liberal friends, the Supreme Court did not just rule in favor of anti-gay bigotry.
It ruled against being an anti-religious, bigoted jerk.
Few stories in recent years have suffered from such incompetent media coverage as the tale of Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop. When a cable news anchorman “reported” yesterday that the court “ruled a bakery had the right to refuse service to gay people, just because they are gay,” he got it completely wrong.
Phillips never refused to serve gay people. In most cases, he had no way of knowing his customers’ sexual orientation, and nobody claims he’s ever expressed any interest.
All he asked was the right not to participate in a same-sex wedding celebration as their artisan baker. That’s all.
So when the gay couple who filed the original complaint say Phillips’ message was “we don’t serve your kind here,” they’re not just lying. They’re smearing him as a bigot — which is, of course, the real goal. The new gay rights movement isn’t about ending the suffering of same-sex couples, it’s about how liberal elites find faith itself insufferable.
Colorado’s (so-called) Commission on Civil Rights didn’t rule that discrimination is bad — in fact, as Justice Kennedy noted, they upheld the right of businesses to refuse to print anti-gay marriage Bible verses. Instead, Colorado ruled that the faith-based belief in traditional marriage itself is bad. That for believing it, you are doing something bad, too.
Imagine how Phillips must have felt when one of the “fair and unbiased” commissioners said during his hearing that “freedom of religion” has been used to “justify all kinds of discrimination … including slavery and the Holocaust,” before ordering the baker to comply or be closed down.
This is what the Supreme Court overturned. Not the right to be gay and buy cake, but the right to be religiously faithful in the workplace without getting smitten from on high by some bigoted government goon.
“But who will bake their cakes?!” you ask. Oh, please. The notion that, unless we force Baptist bakers into the kitchens to cook over the fires of their burning Bibles, gay couples will go cakeless on their wedding day is ludicrous.
What’s much harder to find is a “tolerant” liberal who still practices tolerance.