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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
You understand that in order to claim that, there has to be an enduring concept of first principles or natural law as it applies to those things? And that if this is the case, your correction of WC was in error?
Also, just out of interest, do you believe that the prohibition of unlawful violence is more or less effective than first principles would dictate?
My going rate remains similar whatever the multiple. If you’re going to increase that rate, even with a very low multiple, I’m not going to object.
I don’t believe that MJ was asking you to apologize for your marriage. If he had done so, I’m sure he’d have received some moderating response. I’m also pretty sure that you know that the first six words are a personal attack that adds little to the conversation. Similarly, I feel confident that you’re aware of Ricochet’s view that all caps are shouting and thus should be excluded under the CoC, particularly so when the all caps are to emphasize a personal attack.
What was your purpose in this comment? Were you just trying to get into the spirit of the uglier moments of 2014?
I agree that limited government infringes on all of our individual rights less aggressively than bigger government. I do not believe that this is an argument against individual rights. I believe both in smaller government and in gun rights and do not believe that either is sufficient to guarantee the other. Likewise speech, excessive fines, and travel. That two things support each other is not a sound argument that those two things are in opposition.
I haven’t conceded that marriage is part of those first principles or natural law.
Fine. Maybe marriage is one of the universal elements of human society that is unrelated to natural law; I’ll leave others to educate you on Locke, Hooker, and Aquinas. It is not the case that government treatment of rights alters their status as natural legal rights.
Once you grant the government the power to define something of course it alters its status as a natural right at least functionally. It’s why I don’t like giving government the power to define property. The government has gained the ability to define privacy which is why we have slowly seen the erosion of privacy rights. We did not simply grant government the power to recognize or protect marriage, we granted it the right to define marriage by making it a state administered institution.
What? I read all his comments so far, and saw nothing remotely like that.
Well, read #157, then.
One helpful way to understand this would be to look at natural rights as belonging in a hierarchy with constitutional rights beneath them and statutory rights beneat that (and regulatory rights next). Then compare City of Boerne v Flores with Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal. Congress can provide protection for religious freedom, but it cannot change the meaning of the Constitution, even to strengthen that meaning. For most jurisdictions in America when we talk about religious freedom what matters is the text and case history of the RFRA, so we aren’t so concerned with the First Amendment, but that doesn’t mean that the First Amendment ceases to exist and to maintain its own separate meaning.
Similarly, if you’re dealing with a law you will most often be dealing with the code of federal regulations, but the complexity of the CFR does not mean that the underlying law does not exist even if it is not what one interacts with directly. When you deal with a natural right, your immediate interface will be whatever the instantiation of that right is within your jurisdiction, but the particular version you’re dealing with does not destroy or alter the original.
Another way to put it is that the government has the ability to define terms for its own use. It does not have the ability to alter reality with those definitions. If the government defines Pi as 3.14, the shape of circles will not change. If the government defines property rights as excluding a right to exclude others from one’s home, that does not mean that natural property rights no longer include that right. Totalitarian governments act unjustly rather than by redefining justice as a matter of moral law.