Controversy of the week
Gay wedding cake: What the Supreme Court’s ruling means
If this decision were a wedding cake, said Mark Joseph Stern in Slate.com, it would leave “everyone wanting more.” This week the Supreme Court released its longawaited ruling in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Rather than tackle the central issue, though—whether a claim of “religious liberty” entitled a Christian baker to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding—the court effectively punted. In a surprisingly lopsided 7-2 decision, the justices ruled for the baker, Jack Phillips, but on the narrow grounds that members of the Civil Rights Commission had verbally disparaged Phillips’ religious beliefs when they said that “religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, including slavery.” These hostile comments, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority, violated the Constitution’s guarantee that “laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion.” The LGBT community and its allies should still be relieved, said Cristian Farias in NYMag.com. The religious right was seeking “a blanket shield to discriminate.” Kennedy, instead, explicitly reaffirmed “the rights and dignity of gay persons” and wrote that as “a general rule,” businesses may not deny service to gays by claiming a “religious objection.” By handing a partial victory to each side, Kennedy managed “to have his cake and eat it.”
This ruling wasn’t “nearly as narrow as legal progressives would have you believe,” said NationalReview.com in an editorial. It’s true the court ducked the question of whether government can force citizens to violate their religious beliefs—that issue is sure to be addressed in cases already working their way through the legal system—but this ruling was still “broad enough to matter.” The Colorado Civil Rights Commission is hardly alone in insisting that religious-liberty claims are “despicable” pretexts for bigotry. Virtually every progressive shares that belief. State and local governments now stand warned that hostility toward people of faith will “carry a cost.”
We may have “lost a battle” in this case, but we “won the war,” said lawyer David Cole, who represented the gay couple, in WashingtonPost.com. My clients, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, simply asked for the same decorative, edible cake that Phillips would have made for a straight couple, not a cake adorned with slogans “expressing” pro-gay or anti-Christian sentiments. Kennedy “could not have been more clear” that neither religion nor free speech justifies denying common goods and services to people based on their sexual orientation. If Craig and Mullins were to walk into Masterpiece Cakeshop tomorrow, in other words, and request a cake to celebrate their wedding anniversary, Phillips now knows he has “no First Amendment right to turn them away.”
For that reason, “the fight is far from over,” said Todd Starnes in FoxNews.com. Liberals won’t rest until, as Justice Clarence Thomas put it in his concurring opinion, they “stamp out every vestige of dissent” on the secular redefinition of marriage. Christian conservatives won’t be deterred either, said Paul Waldman in WashingtonPost.com. They’re waging a fierce legal campaign to get a special status enjoyed by no other group and “exempt themselves from laws they find disagreeable.” Given the “nakedly tribal” support of the current occupant of the White House, I wouldn’t bet against them. This week’s ruling showed there are four solid votes on the court for letting Christians discriminate against gays in the name of religious freedom. “All they need is one more.”