In one of the most anticipated Supreme Court rulings of the year, involving the question of whether an anti-gay baker has to bake a cake for a gay wedding, the court today decided to punt. While you’ll probably see a lot of headlines proclaiming “Christian Baker Wins At Supreme Court!”, in fact the justices decided not to decide the underlying question of whether someone like that baker can discriminate against certain customers.
That question is a vital one, and it’s part of an incredibly ambitious campaign waged by the religious right and the Republican Party to essentially turn conservative Christians into a class with special rights. They haven’t won yet, but they could be on their way.
This case, called Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, involved a Colorado law that bars discrimination against gay people (among others), and a Christian baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. The baker’s claim was essentially that the law had to yield to his interpretation of his religion; while the New Testament is notoriously silent on the production of wedding cakes, he felt it would compromise his beliefs to have to perform the service for which he was in business, if it meant performing that service for a same-sex wedding. The couple was not asking that the cake be decorated with any pro-gay messages; it was the fact that it was for a same-sex wedding that the baker objected to.
The outcome that the plaintiff, religious right organizations, the Trump administration, and virtually the entire Republican Party wanted was one in which the Supreme Court would declare that religious people — particularly Christians, since they’re the ones who usually make these kinds of claims — can pretty much pick and choose which laws they want to obey, so long as they can cite a religious basis for their objection. That was not what the court gave them.
The seven justices who agreed on this ruling (all the conservatives, plus Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan) managed to avoid the underlying issue by pointing to comments made by members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which adjudicates these kinds of claims in the state. Even though there were some complex First Amendment questions at issue — is baking and decorating a cake simply a commercial transaction or is it an artistic expression? — they set those questions aside and ruled that statements made by commissioners in hearings demonstrated a hostility to the baker’s religion, and if their decision was based on that hostility, it’s unconstitutional.
Read the full story at the Washington Post
