SCOTUS Sides With Baker in LGBT Wedding Cake Case

[Kramanica]

Probably. The ACLU is legitimately terrible.

The SPLC is better anyway.

The SPLC are glorified bullies who frequently abuse their power.

[Ors Might]

Probably. The ACLU is legitimately terrible.

The SPLC is better anyway.

Damn, had no idea the ACLU was that shit.

[Washington Resistance Army]

The SPLC is a bad meme that has a vested interest (they're a for profit group) in lying their asses off about how prevalent racism and such things are.

[The Black Forrest]

The SPLC is better anyway.

The SPLC are glorified bullies who frequently abuse their power.

Soooooooo who should people be supporting then?

[The South Falls]

The SPLC is a bad meme that has a vested interest (they're a for profit group) in lying their asses off about how prevalent racism and such things are.

Alright, I made a joke. Both actually suck. In reality, though, the ACLU is slightly better.

[Kramanica]

The SPLC are glorified bullies who frequently abuse their power.

Soooooooo who should people be supporting then?

The GOA.

The 2A guarantees all other civil rights.

[The South Falls]

Soooooooo who should people be supporting then?

The GOA.

The 2A guarantees all other civil rights.

The NC2A is actually doing things. The GOA... maybe not...

[The Black Forrest]

The GOA.

The 2A guarantees all other civil rights.

The NC2A is actually doing things. The GOA... maybe not...

Would the baker shoot hoops with the gays?

[Delta-9 Tetrahydrocannabinol]

I agree with SCOTUS’s decision on this issue. Like it or not, pastry art is still art, it doesn’t matter if one “remembers cake makers” or not. An artist should not be forced to participate or create pieces that they don’t want to create. I never understood this mentality of among some LGBT people of forcing business to service their weddings even if the owner disagrees with it morally.

No, you’re not going to “emlimate homophobia” by forcing conservative and religious people to participate in their weddings. Why do you want to give them your money anyway? Or is just about trying to stick it those mean old conservative Christians?

[United Muscovite Nations]

Oh...you are serious....

Probably. The ACLU is legitimately terrible.

In my experience it's pretty unbiased actually. I know in the past they've defended anti-LGBT speech.

[Kramanica]

The NC2A is actually doing things. The GOA... maybe not...

Would the baker shoot hoops with the gays?

Basketball does bring people together...

[Delta-9 Tetrahydrocannabinol]

Soooooooo who should people be supporting then?

The GOA.

The 2A guarantees all other civil rights.

I don’t need the GOA nor the NRA to insure my 2A rights. I stopped supporting gun rights organizations when they started to blame video games for mass shootings.

[Washington Resistance Army]

Probably. The ACLU is legitimately terrible.

In my experience it's pretty unbiased actually. I know in the past they've defended anti-LGBT speech.

Their bias bleeds through on a few issues (gun rights) but yeah they are better than most. I try to balance things out by donating to the NRA-ILA or GOA whenever I donate to the ACLU.

[The South Falls]

The NC2A is actually doing things. The GOA... maybe not...

Would the baker shoot hoops with the gays?

Wrong NC2A.

[Longweather]

Well he must be a fundamentalist christian to use religion to argue against serving homosexuals.
However, under the premise of freedom of religion i suppose the court ruling was right. If the baker wants to be a fundamentalist christian that reads into the bible literally then he should be allowed to do that..

Not serving homsexuals. The man was fine with providing other services such as baking other types of goods and selling ones already made. However, they do not morally support same-sex marriage for religious reasons and refused to use their artistic talent to make a custom order wedding cake for one.

Got to give it to the guy, he apparently stopped making wedding cakes and took a big hit to his income to comply with the CCRC decision while waiting for the appeals process to get to this point.

[The Black Forrest]

Well he must be a fundamentalist christian to use religion to argue against serving homosexuals.
However, under the premise of freedom of religion i suppose the court ruling was right. If the baker wants to be a fundamentalist christian that reads into the bible literally then he should be allowed to do that..

Not serving homsexuals. The man was fine with providing other services such as baking other types of goods and selling ones already made. However, they do not morally support same-sex marriage for religious reasons and refused to use their artistic talent to make a custom order wedding cake for one.

Got to give it to the guy, he apparently stopped making wedding cakes and took a big hit to his income to comply with the CCRC decision while waiting for the appeals process to get to this point.

Complying or trying to gain support for his discrimination? See I had to stop because of THEM!.....

[Right wing humour squad]

Rad.

[Telconi]

Not serving homsexuals. The man was fine with providing other services such as baking other types of goods and selling ones already made. However, they do not morally support same-sex marriage for religious reasons and refused to use their artistic talent to make a custom order wedding cake for one.

Got to give it to the guy, he apparently stopped making wedding cakes and took a big hit to his income to comply with the CCRC decision while waiting for the appeals process to get to this point.

Complying or trying to gain support for his discrimination? See I had to stop because of THEM!.....

Why not both?

[Longweather]

Not serving homsexuals. The man was fine with providing other services such as baking other types of goods and selling ones already made. However, they do not morally support same-sex marriage for religious reasons and refused to use their artistic talent to make a custom order wedding cake for one.

Got to give it to the guy, he apparently stopped making wedding cakes and took a big hit to his income to comply with the CCRC decision while waiting for the appeals process to get to this point.

Complying or trying to gain support for his discrimination? See I had to stop because of THEM!.....

Not being psychic, I wouldn't know. However, taking such a hit to his income and his willingness to provide other services that weren't artistic commissions for a wedding to the offended party makes me think he was the former.

[Christian Democrats]

A good decision, but the Supreme Court should have gone further, closer to what Justice Thomas says in his concurring opinion. The government cannot force people to create art that violates their beliefs, religious or otherwise.

[Reverend Norv]

I don't know if this has been mentioned here yet, but so it's clear: this decision only sets a very limited precedent.

Colorado's antidiscrimination law, Justice Kennedy writes for the majority, is a law of general application. As written, it does not specifically target religious people, business owners, or artists. In fact, it also provides antidiscrimination protections based on religion. Nowhere in the opinion does the Court hold that it is unconstitutional to require businesses to serve gay customers.

What the Court does say is that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in its application of the antidiscrimination statute, showed especial bias and hostility toward religious defendants, including the plaintiff. Which is true. One commissioner compared the plaintiff's beliefs to Nazism. Moreover, the commission held that secular bakers who refused to bake homophobic cakes could do so, because the cakes would be a form of speech by the baker. For the plaintiff, they held that his wedding cake was a form of speech by the customer, not the baker. That kind of double standard - secular people, essentially, have the extent of their speech construed more broadly than religious people - violates the Free Exercise Clause.

So this particular baker, because he was treated unfairly by the Commission, had his free exercise rights limited in an unconstitutional way, and he rightly won his case. But the ruling rests on the Commission's bias and hostility - not on the antidiscrimination law itself. As Justice Kagan writes in her concurrence, had the Commission not shown such hostility, its decision might even have stood - because the secular bakers would have refused to make homophobic cakes for any customers, regardless of religion, while Phillips refused to bake a cake for a gay couple specifically because they were gay. That's a valid reason for the Commission to find discrimination in the second case but not the first. But instead of that rationale, it repeatedly demeaned the plaintiff and belittled his beliefs.

The main point is that this remains an open question.The only precedent set here is that state civil rights commissions shouldn't be jackasses. As Kennedy writes: "it is proper to hold that whatever the outcome of some future controversy involving facts similar to these, the Commission’s actions here violated the Free Exercise Clause; and its order must be set aside." [emphasis mine]

[Bakra]

The SPLC are glorified bullies who frequently abuse their power.

Soooooooo who should people be supporting then?

"No one" is an option. Syphoning off your principles to the only bidder is how we got the 2016 election

[Pope Joan]

So why does the First amendment trump the fourteenth, rather than all of them being equal?

It is the spirit of the times; those winds may change; they have before.

[Auralia]

This ruling isn't quite as narrow as some people are making it out to be, for two reasons.

First, Kennedy at least seems open to the idea that the baker had a valid free speech claim and would have won on those grounds, even in the absence of anti-Christian animus from the Commission. To be clear, the Court did not rule one way or the other on this point. However, if Kennedy thought that the baker was clearly in the wrong, he could have just signed onto Ginsburg's or Kagan's opinion. But he didn't do that -- he wrote this instead:

The free speech aspect of this case is difficult, for few persons who have seen a beautiful wedding cake might have thought of its creation as an exercise of protected speech. This is an instructive example, however, of the proposition that the application of constitutional freedoms in new contexts can deepen our understanding of their meaning.

And this:

If a baker refused to design a special cake with words or images celebrating the marriage—for instance, a cake showing words with religious meaning—that might be different from a refusal to sell any cake at all. In defining whether a baker’s creation can be protected, these details might make a difference.

Second, Kennedy seems to be disturbed by the idea that the Commission and the Colorado courts were okay with certain bakers refusing to bake cakes that denigrated gay marriage, but not okay with Phillips refusing to bake a cake supporting a gay marriage. He highlights several similarities between the cases that seem to have been unfairly dismissed, and he also criticizes the idea that the cases can be distinguished simply because the government finds the anti-gay marriage view offensive:

The Commission ruled against Phillips in part on the theory that any message the requested wedding cake would carry would be attributed to the customer, not to the baker. Yet the Division did not address this point in any of the other cases with respect to the cakes depicting anti-gay marriage symbolism. Additionally, the Division found no violation of CADA in the other cases in part because each bakery was willing to sell other products, including those depicting Christian themes, to the prospective customers. But the Commission dismissed Phillips’ willingness to sell “birthday cakes, shower cakes, [and] cookies and brownies,” to gay and lesbian customers as irrelevant. The treatment of the other cases and Phillips’ case could reasonably be interpreted as being inconsistent as to the question of whether speech is involved, quite apart from whether the cases should ultimately be distinguished. In short, the Commission’s consideration of Phillips’ religious objection did not accord with its treatment of these other objections.

A principled rationale for the difference in treatment of these two instances cannot be based on the government’s own assessment of offensiveness. Just as “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion,” it is not, as the Court has repeatedly held, the role of the State or its officials to prescribe what shall be offensive. The Colorado court’s attempt to account for the difference in treatment elevates one view of what is offensive over another and itself sends a signal of official disapproval of Phillips’ religious beliefs. The court’s footnote does not, therefore, answer the baker’s concern that the State's practice was to disfavor the religious basis of his objection.

Again, Kennedy isn't explicitly saying that there's no way to reconcile these discrepancies, but he certainly considers them suspect. The general sense I get from Kennedy is that a refusal not to participate in same-sex weddings cannot simply be dismissed as rank bigotry and has to be taken seriously, including in the context of adjudicating anti-discrimination claims -- the implication is that religious liberty should win at least some of the time.

You can read similar analysis from David French in National Review.

[Christian Democrats]

So this particular baker, because he was treated unfairly by the Commission, had his free exercise rights limited in an unconstitutional way, and he rightly won his case. But the ruling rests on the Commission's bias and hostility - not on the antidiscrimination law itself. As Justice Kagan writes in her concurrence, had the Commission not shown such hostility, its decision might even have stood - because the secular bakers would have refused to make homophobic cakes for any customers, regardless of religion, while Phillips refused to bake a cake for a gay couple specifically because they were gay. That's a valid reason for the Commission to find discrimination in the second case but not the first. But instead of that rationale, it repeatedly demeaned the plaintiff and belittled his beliefs.

The part in red is incorrect. Phillips also refused a request from a gay man's heterosexual mother to bake a gay wedding cake. His refusal was not based on the sexual orientation of the prospective customer but rather on the message that the cake would convey -- that homosexual relationships are equal and should be celebrated.