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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
By your definition maybe.
Which, of course, is the reason that SSM is not on the table for discussion.
The definition that Jamie Lockett or Anthony Kennedy uses is radically different than any definition that was ever used by anyone in human history, right down to the definition used by their parents. It is only the current generation in which this definition went from novel curiosity to government mandate.
Your point about no-fault divorce being the key that allowed this cultural calamity is valid. Social conservatives were pilloried by our intelligentsia at the time for their “slippery slope” argument.
It is the definition used by over 60% of Americans. Once you concede that government is involved in marriage then in a democratic system the definition shifts with that of the public.
Jamie, I would encourage you not to engage MJ on this. He seems to be nostalgic for Ricochet circa 2014 and I doubt anyone else is.
I’m in the minority in thinking that Scalia was 100% right in Smith. If a law requires you to carve out a permanent exception for groups of people, that’s a good sign that you’ve either written a law poorly or that you’re talking about a subject where law is the wrong remedy. That is, if Eucharistic wine is always an acceptable exception to the general rule that liquor should be prohibited… maybe liquor shouldn’t be prohibited.
It never works out this way in practice, but the expectation should always be that laws have no exceptions.
I don’t know… SSM or Trump wars? At times, the current situation has successfully made me nostalgic for the post-Obergefell “unity” we once enjoyed. It was practically the Peace of Westphalia.
Interestingly, Trump launched his campaign on June 16, 2015; Obergefell was decided 10 days later. It was quite a week+ for Ricochet, though no one knew it at the time.
I believe these are what Tyler Cowen calls “very good sentences”
A bold prediction! Have you done any analysis of voting on the issue by the current Justices in post-Smith cases? I have not.
I think that Scalia was motivated by more than drug warrior mentality. I think that there were two other factors: (1) worry that in an increasingly diverse society, the number of Court-policed exceptions to laws of general application would multiply and create a legitimacy problem, and (2) confidence that the people, and their representatives, could and would fix the problem more effectively than courts. He was right about #2 in the 1990s, but I don’t think that this remains true today.
I preferred pre 2016 Ricochet.
Yeah, like Christians get married so often that they need lots of baked goods. However, chick filet and hobby lobby do benefit from this.
I eat baked goods all the bloody time (for proof see my belly).
Yes.
Don’t you dare you my Facebook posts against me.
That could prove exculpatory!
It’s been a while since I read Atlas, but, I don’t think Rand was that far off.
Do you feel the same way about property rights? Once the government is involved in the allocation of property, natural rights no longer have any meaning and everything becomes entirely subject to the popular whim?
How about privacy? Or violence? Is there any natural right that exists in America today, free from government involvement?
Do you believe that conscription was called for in Britain and/ or France in 1939? Do you believe that it was sensible for the state to allow for conscientious objection?
I agree with Scalia in the immediate result of Smith; if you’re a current drug user, you shouldn’t be employed to get people off drugs. To my mind, firing people from jobs that they are manifestly unqualified for on the basis that they are unqualified to do them should pass strict scrutiny. Seventh Day Adventists shouldn’t be forced to draw blood, but if a phlebotomist converts and decides not to continue doing so, the state should not be compelled to continue employing them in that capacity. The combination of state and federal RFRAs seems to fix the problems with Smith in the civilized states.
Short answer “Yes and yes.”
Longer answer:
There’s no natural right to marriage – within the context of government it is a state-regulated privilege whose definition isn’t defined constitutionally and is therefore subject to modification through democratic processes… and therefore judicial ones, as we’ve seen.
I don’t think there’s any natural right which is unlimited or can’t be stripped or modified so long as its being done via due process of law. That presumes of course, that the law being applied in that case is a moral law.
You can dream up reasonable exceptions to any natural right under the correct circumstances.
Hold it right there, mister. Given that marriage predates any government humans ever created, and given that evidence exists indicating that Neanderthals had marriage, meaning that it not only predates government, but our entire species by hundreds of thousands of years, I’d say you’re on seriously shaky ground with a statement like that.
I’ve tried to be consistent about this throughout the entire thing, and marriage being a state-regulated privilege is pretty obvious – just look at how marriage law varies from state to state.
If Republicans had been serious about making it impossible for there to be gay marriage they would have sought to amend the Constitution back in the 90s around the time that DoMA passed and was signed by Bill Clinton. That they didn’t do this indicates to me one of two things: either their heart wasn’t really in it or they basically just wanted a political football to kick around repeatedly and never really do anything about. Maybe both.
The reality of the situation is that marriage throughout history hasn’t always had one consistent and monolithic meaning. As a species we’ve seen plenty of permutations and combinations, including no small amount of polyandry throughout the years.
Now, does that mean that various religious sects can define marriage how they want? Absolutely. That’s what this is all about in the end – The freedom of those groups and individuals to associate how they choose.
It’s not like Locke talked about marriage in the Second Treatise on Government (unless I’m mistaken.) He talked principally about “Life, Liberty and Property.”
It should be obvious as well that you are siding with Kennedy and the Liberals on the SCOTUS if you assert that marriage is a right. That’s essentially the crux of Obergefell; that marriage is a right and the only reason for denying certain persons that right is a sort of hidebound, irrational bigotry.
This is my central problem with Locke; there’s no objective grounds on which to base any claim. Since marriage is a universal human phenomenon, stretching slightly further within human civilization than property rights, it seems obvious to me that there is a natural right to marriage.
I agree that the government’s definition of marriage is not defined Constitionally and is hence subject to significant degrees of modification; polygamy, for instance, could have gone, and could go, either way. Loving, likewise, is a debateable decision.
Jamie wasn’t saying that. Jamie was saying that there was no external reality. Property rights, similarly, are not defined by the Constitution and are subject to tremendous amounts of legislative modification. There are limits; the Takings Clause is by far the biggest, but taxes other than income taxes have to be proportional among the states and so on. Nonetheless, property rights, as a matter of the Lockean understanding of the world, exist regardless of the state’s position. Stalin’s Russia was not able to eradicate those rights, although it was able to violate them.
Sure. I’m not opposed to the claim that there are reasonable exceptions to all rights. Pretty much everything comes down to balancing tests. I was just responding to Jamie’s suggestion that there was no existence to natural rights outside of the popular whim.
I side with Kennedy and the Liberals on the question of whether marriage is a right. I also side with Thomas and the Conservatives; there were 9 votes for marriage being a right.
I disagree with Obergefell because I do not side with Kennedy and the Liberals on the rest of the claim. If you believe that my agreeing with conservatives where they agree with liberals and agreeing with conservatives when they disagree with liberals can accurately be described as my agreeing with the liberals in general, I believe that we need to abstract this issue out a little further.
I think there are two separate things that need to be sussed-out.
My understanding is that the consensus is settling on the idea that Neanderthals (like Denisovans) were a subspecies Homo sapiens.
Unless your ancestry is all sub-Saharan African, you’re likely at least a few percent Neanderthal.
#EveryoneHatesAPendant
And proud of it!
The eyebrows on top of my prominent supraorbital ridges wag at you, sir.