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Masterpiece Cakes v. Colorado’s Ministry of Love
Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakes.
This morning, the Supreme Court of the US granted cert to hear Jack Phillips’s suit against the Colorado Human Rights Commission (an Orwellian name appropriate to these loathsome apparatchiks of Cultural Marxism) in which that board held Phillips’s Masterpiece Cakes had violated the human rights of a gay couple by refusing to bake them a wedding cake.
The case in my opinion is, or ought to be, a slam dunk in favor of Phillips. While the Obergefell decision legalized gay marriage throughout the land, persons such as myself were not cheered at the fact that the right outcome was likely reached through the wrong process. The outcome in question has borne fruit of a similar nature, in that this judicial steamroller has been set loose throughout the land in a wave of forced tolerance, trampling of the First Amendment rights of various objectors.
Of interest in this case is not only the Religious Freedom aspect, but a potential for the restoration of some genuine freedom of association via the pushing back of the frontier of public accommodation laws.
Certainly, the usual suspects at the ACLU, GLAAD, and various other fronts of Cult Marx will squeal mightily should the conservatives on the Court rule (correctly) that people should not be forced to celebrate or engage in commerce with occasions they find offensive to their religious convictions, but it will be a step in the right direction for all involved. The protection of the law against State coercion and discrimination (as was upheld today 7-2 in the Trinity case) doesn’t end where homosexuality begins.
I am also not insensitive to the fact that Neil Gorsuch will play a large role in this process, for which I heartily congratulate the President and wish him many more successful SCOTUS appointments.
Published in General
Good point. Enter Mr. Hamilton and his wicked “implied powers” trope.
Fair enough, but I think it’s incumbent on us to get the governments of all areas staffed with people who seek to confine government to very narrow areas of authority.
Except I want our empire destroyed so that we might get back to republican governance. And yes, I meant for the “r” to be lowercase.
Oh man, what a dreamer!! Even in Texas, you won’t find a majority of politicians in Austin as dedicated to liberty as you or I are.
This is the real issue. A distinction needs to be recognized in the law between a level of service which does not require one to actually participate in something, and one that does. Actually catering a wedding is definitely in the latter category. Baking a cake may be. Resolving the issue with this in mind will allow a solution which takes religion out of the equation entirely, and head off the objections that “if you allow this then you allow racial discrimination too.”
If someone gets hired for a job, then quits when he finds out the owner of the company he works for is a race he doesn’t like or is gay or whatever, should that person be in trouble under a civil rights law? He has refused to perform paid service for someone because of a racist or anti-gay motive. Yet not even liberals would say he should be prosecuted or sued for this decision. Why? Because to do so would force him into involuntary servitude.
So is refusing to cater a wedding or bake a cake more like that situation, or more like a situation where a restaurant doesn’t serve certain types of customers for racist reasons? If bright lines can be drawn with these questions in mind, it will allow a solution that doesn’t give some people (religious people) the right to behave in ways that others cannot, and which would empower government to be the arbiter of what religious motivations are “religious enough”.
Your hypo might be a little off since in the case of bakers the prospective employer seeks them out and recruits them, so to speak. What if we were to change it to a first round draft pick in the NFL who did not want to play for the drafting team because of the race of the owner or coach? Would that have legal ramifications–barring we all acknowledge that the NFL operates under contractual law as well as civil rights law and just look at the hypo in the specific terms spelled out by Mr. Wainwright?
Not being a lawyer I’m not sure if this is a foolish question.
Is the issue that the prospective cake buyer is part of a protected class that’s the problem? Would the court be hearing this if it was a neo-Nazi being refused?
Also, prior to the inaugural there were designers who said they would refuse to create a gown for Melania Trump. If Melania took it to court (not that she would) would it be taken as far as this case?
Sorry if this sounded silly.
I think the first question is absolutely correct. The fact that the person being refused is seen as being a member that is member of group that has faced systematic abuse and therefore deserving of legal protection. In the second question, Malania would not have a case because she is being refused on an individual basis and not for a physical characteristic, religious creed, or sexual orientation. The designers were not saying that all Melanias, but only one specific Melania would be subject to the discrimination.
Thank you Robert. Does this mean that if the cake baker had simply said I refuse “just because” this would not be an issue?
If the owner had simply declined to do the work claiming “scheduling conflict” or something along those lines, it seems more likely that this wouldn’t have been an issue. These owners aren’t sophisticated about this however because they’re running a business, not looking out for how to avoid lawsuit trolls.
So that wasn’t what happened because this entire situation has been set up from the beginning by a series of intentional moves by LGBT activists who know which bakers/photographers etc. are likely to decline to provide services on some religious basis. They’ve been hoping to provoke a showdown about this (note how there are similar situations in multiple states… it’s coordinated and intentional) for some time because they feel as if the wind is at their backs and figure there’s a ratchet effect at play where they’ll be able to establish a form of legal hegemony moving forward.
It’s an old playbook move – find / create a test case and attempt to replicate it in multiple jurisdictions at the same time to give it the false appearance of “consensus”.
Yeah, MJ is right. There was no amount of foresight that would have prevented these folks from coming into the cross-hairs of the LGBTQSHODPF:KL:DFJP community.
I wouldn’t work for the government under any circumstances (military excluded). I’m sure a lot of conservatives feel the same way.
The problem with this example is that Obama has not made it public that he provides the service of cleaning out garages, so there is no basis to claim that he is accommodating most of the public while denying specific segments.
The better example is to simply flip the script: should gay bakers be forced to bake Prop 8 cakes, or black bakers be forced to bake KKK kakes?
In fact, I’m quite surprised that no one has forced this issue yet. Why aren’t Milo and/or Ann Coulter going around to Berkeley’s many no-doubt vegan bakeries and asking for cakes promoting their canceled appearances?
This is correct logic but that doesn’t mean the High Court will exercise it. After all, the Supremes granted that the federal government has the power to coerce/force citizens to purchase a private service (healthcare) under threat of fine and imprisonment — which really establishes a precedent that the federal gov’t at some point could claim that for the greater welfare of the nation, everyone must drive an electric car by a specified date or also be faced with fines and imprisonment.
If they rule against the Christian bakers, then presumably states could delve into the recipes of each cake and the baking method to make sure that the final product is cooked to the satisfaction of a state inspector. Perhaps the state could also require that state inspectors attend gay weddings (at the bakery’s expense) to sample each cake before the groom and groom or bride and bride do so, to makes sure that the cake is pleasing to the tastebuds. Of course, if the cakes don’t pass the state inspection taste test, then the state could fine the bakeries or close them down altogether on the pretext that the cakes made aren’t sufficiently delectable.
It’s difficult to believe that even Orwell, Huxley and Ayn Rand could have imagined the absurdities of the PC and the easily-offended society America has become.
Any decent person would respond that a gay customer should shop freely, and that he or she respects the baker that declines for faith reasons. The baker respectfully directs him or her to the 5 other bakeries in town, and the customer responds decently by honoring that person’s beliefs – too simplistic?
Too common sense!
Perhaps, just perhaps, the Court will finally say what’s been obvious for 20 years: that the extraordinary crisis of Jim Crow that justified the imposition of otherwise “noxious to liberty” public accommodation laws is over and the whole edifice should be swept away. We can hope anyway.
There is a very clear difference.
We have no evidence that Judge Mental belongs to a protected class under Colorado law.
Masterpiece Cakeshop is under the boot of the Human Rights Commission of Colorado under the terms of Colorado law, which created protected classes of citizens. If you belong to a protected class, then you have the right to file a claim with the Colorado HRC for redress whenever you feel offended. This triggers the HRC to go crush the offenders.
This amounts to a system in which everyone who does not belong to a protected class is a second-class citizen. If you are a second class citizen in Colorado, you have been stripped of your right to the free exercise of traditionalist Christian religion.
They had the chance to set that kind of standard, but Sandra Day O’Conner blew it with her invented standard that we need another 25 years of affirmative action. That case should have been the beginning of ending all of those laws.
Yea, but first of all, we’re 60% of the way there already. She said that almost 15 years ago. (Yea, I know. Time flies and we’re gettin’ old.) Second, Neil Gorsuch ain’t Sandra Day O’Connor.
The bakery was freely willing to sell ordinary bakery products to the gay couple. What they objected to was making the wedding cake.
Wedding cakes are special. They are the centerpiece of a particularly curious couple of wedding traditions, and can be quite specialized works of art. So much so, that on occasion a celebrity wedding writeup in the local paper society pages will include the name of the bakery. Because it is a special-order item that is prone to publicity, it forces the bakery into a position in which their name could be associated with the public celebration of the same-sex wedding. This amounts to forced speech, so this is a second count in which the First Amendment rights of the baker are violated.
The main problem is that these cases are typically forced into being by a homosexual couple shopping around looking for a fight. They put in orders, cancel the ones where the bakers have no objection to their lifestyle, then make a big whoopti-do about the ones that do. I have read that in a number of such cases the couple in question never actually got married, they just wanted to start trouble.
I am not advocating this solution, but if the right copied the tactics of the left we could probably end this nonsense fairly quickly. Just finance the right-wing equivalent of Soros’ astroturf goon squads, then in cases where religious rights are attacked have them show up and protest the wedding. (Maybe the Westboro nitwits could be put to some use for a change.) The homosexual couples who were serious about having a ceremony might just decide that choosing another baker might be a wise idea. The ones who were just looking for trouble would get what they wanted, too.
This is the perfect argument. If you are a real judge, you should file an amicus brief.
I’m not a judge, but I do play one on Ricochet.
I wouldn’t trust him to clean out a litter box, much less my garage.
I think we have to be careful how we talk about Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws were state-sponsored discrimination. The people are allowed to discriminate (and did it all the time until recently. It’s called “common sense” and “objective truth” to have men’s or women’s -only sports teams and restrooms/locker rooms, for example). The people are sovereign.
The special rights given to gays (marriage), transgenders (restrooms/locker rooms), blacks (college admissions) are really more like Jim Crow laws. It is the government discriminating, in this case, in favor of the minority group.
Majestyk, thanks for this.
Jim Crow was state required discrimination. Business owners had to discriminate even if they didn’t want to.