S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Supreme Court’s decision on Jack Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakeshop is expected in the next two to three weeks. While the outcome could surprise us all, the result both sides of the political spectrum predict is a substantial win for the Left packaged as a favorable verdict for the Right. That is, the court will rule “for” Phillips but against his cause.
The reason is pretty simple: Justice Anthony Kennedy is the swing vote, and in the oral arguments last December, his mind seemed made up. Kennedy knows that if Phillips’ speech as a cake artist is protected, then the speech of creative designers of every kind in the wedding industry must also be protected.
“It means there’s basically an ability to boycott gay marriages,” Kennedy said, an outcome he made clear was not acceptable. “The problem for you,” Kennedy explained to Phillips’ attorneys, “is that so many of these examples—and a photographer can be included—do involve speech.” Protecting such speech would be “an affront to the gay community,” which Kennedy thinks is concerning, perhaps illegal.
At the same time, Kennedy is likely sensitive to the fact that Phillips has won his case in the courts of popular opinion, by a two-thirds majority . In the December oral arguments, Kennedy appeared to be exploring a clever legal loophole to escape this dilemma. Most likely, he will write a narrow fact-based decision that will leave the judicial framework that prosecuted Phillips in place, but excuse the baker personally from any further punishment, on the notion that some of the judges involved in Phillips’ case were biased against religion.
Such an opinion would tend to leave folks like Phillips guilty by implication without forcing the court to explain, head-on, why Christian bakers are obligated to design cakes for same-sex weddings.
Does Sexual Orientation Really Compare to Race?
But obligated they would be, and the reason, whether SCOTUS records it or not, ought to be publicly examined. It begins with the following question: If Phillips’ First Amendment rights allow him to break Colorado anti-discrimination law with respect to sexual orientation, then why couldn’t somebody else do so with respect to race ?
This question has dominated media arguments against Phillips , and was the issue for liberal justices during oral arguments. Justice Sonia Sotomayor harped on Newman v. Piggie , Justice Stephen Breyer brought up Ollie’s Barbecue , and Justice Elena Kagan asked point-blank: “Same case or not the same case, if [Phillips] instead objected to interracial marriage?”
Of course, Phillips’s attorney replied that was “a very different case” because the “objection would be based on who the person is, rather than what the message is.” “Mr. Phillips,” she explained, “is looking at not the ‘who’ but the ‘what’ in these instances.” To which Justice Neil Gorsuch replied, in arguably the most important question of the entire case:
Well, actually, counsel, that seems to be a point of contention. The state seems to concede that if it were the message, your client would have a right to refuse . But if it — the objection is to the person, that’s when the discrimination law kicks in. That’s footnote 8 of the Colorado Court of Appeals’ decision. I know you know this. So what do you say to that, that actually what is happening here may superficially look like it’s about the message but it’s really about the person’s identity ?
You see, in the Supreme Court, neither the Left nor the Right believes that religious freedom trumps anti-discrimination law. Neither claims practicing homosexuals are just automatically entitled to any service they happen to demand. The law forbids just one thing: discrimination on account of sexual orientation (or race, religion, etc.). The objection must be “to the person,” as Gorsuch pointed out: “that’s when the discrimination law kicks in.”
The footnote Gorsuch mentioned is a great illustration of this. Several Colorado bakeries turned down orders from a Christian for a Bible-shaped cake with Leviticus 18:22 on it. They were not guilty of discrimination because their refusal was based on the message the Christian wanted his cake to convey, not the simple fact that he happened to be a Christian. Le Bakery Sensual had no problem serving Christians in general, and in fact would have been willing to make that Christian pretty much any cake but the “traditional marriage celebration cake” he ordered.
This is common sense, and courts have been quite capable of using it regarding Christians as a protected class. The problem is that the lower courts haven’t been willing to apply this common sense to homosexual anti-discrimination cases.
Instead, as I have noted previously , they decided that when it comes to homosexuality, anti-discrimination law automatically covers any activities “engaged in exclusively or predominately” by members of the protected class. For religion, this is not true. For sex, the idea was rejected. For race, maybe. But for homosexuality, doing is being, and being is a sacred right.
Anti-Discrimination Law Protects Being, Not Doing
Behind Gorsuch’s question lies the understanding that this conclusion ought not be taken for granted. Anti-discrimination law is designed to protect being, not doing, and it isn’t fair to arbitrarily decide for one class that their particular doings are all beings. Nobody has a right to a Leviticus 18:22 cake for his traditional marriage gala even if such celebrations are engaged in “exclusively or predominately” by some brand of Christian.
In the same way, nobody has a right to a wedding cake topped with two men kissing, even if only “gay people” would want such a cake. Unless, of course, it really is true that for “gay people” doing is being.
You see, Christians like Phillips think it is natural to distinguish between the act of “sodomy” and the propensity called sexual orientation. They condemn the act but do not hate or discriminate against those who happen to be tempted to commit it.
When I first started following Phillips’ case, I sent a simple question to his legal team: Many people with persistent same-sex attraction choose to marry a member of the opposite sex. Would Phillips be willing to make a cake for a man and a woman who wanted to marry each other even though they revealed to him that they were both gay? Their immediate and unequivocal response was “Yes – Jack would do the proposed cake.”
This was no surprise. After all, Christians see homosexuality as on a par with your average sexual impulse, no different from a desire to have a one-night stand instead of going home to your wife. Sure, you might have these desires without looking for them, but they don’t define your essence or lay out a blueprint for the “natural” use of your sexuality. They’re just part of the smorgasbord of impulses that we all have to sift in order to choose what is right.
SCOTUS Liberals Think Doing Is Being
But the liberal wing of SCOTUS, which has dominated this issue 5-4 for decades now, does not view homosexuality as comparable to other sexual impulses. Instead, they have argued that homosexuality is to romance what race is to skin-tone: an inborn biological type.
From this point of view, doing really is being, for, as Kennedy puts it in Obergefell v. Hodges , homosexual’s “immutable nature dictates that same-sex marriage is their only real path” to profound romantic commitment. Phillips’ offer of a heterosexual wedding cake to homosexuals is thus an empty one, because no one with a history of exclusive same-sex attraction could want such a cake.
But is the liberal view on the issue factual? Is homosexuality an immutable condition written in one’s DNA? Or is it really just part of the vast spectrum of human desire properly governed by moral precept and choice?
The Research Solidly Finds Sexual Orientation Malleable
Many may be inclined to say that this is a matter of opinion, and that the leftist view on the court is as scientific as the view on the Right. Most liberal judges might agree, since they assume immutability of sexual orientation without bothering to state or defend it. Kennedy, an exception to this rule, cited an American Psychological Association (APA) brief which, though it contains much information designed to support redefining marriage, does not assert that sexual orientation is immutable.
The reason is very simple. There is not only no scientific evidence that sexual orientation is immutable, there is conclusive scientific evidence that most people who experience exclusive same-sex attraction end up developing an interest in the opposite sex over time. The stats on this have been printed out in tables and discussed matter-of-factly in the technical journals for decades, but they have a curious way of never quite making it out of the Archives of Sexual Behavior into CNN’s evening news.
Consider what researchers found in 200 7 when they examined a representative sample of more than 10,000 American youth, following each individual from the age of 16 to 22. Rather than rely on an individual’s reconstruction of his or her past based on current identity, researchers met with people three times throughout the six-year period. The first time, when subjects were 16, researchers asked subjects whether they had ever been romantically attracted to a member of the opposite or same sex. In each successive interview, they were asked about their romantic attractions since last interview.
For instance, 17-year-old males were asked if, in the past year, they had a romantic attraction to another male or female. About 1.5 percent reported only having a romantic attraction to other males. Five years later, when that 1.5 percent of young men were asked about their romantic attractions since the last interview, the overwhelming majority of them (70 percent) reported a 180-degree flip in their sexual orientation—they only had romantic feelings for women.
Similarly, among females, about 40 percent switched from exclusive same-sex attraction (SSA) to exclusive opposite-sex attraction (OSA). Most of the rest (45 percent of total) reported that they had feelings for both men and women. Only 1 percent of women who at 17 reported a full year of exclusive same-sex attraction reported a similar experience in the five years that followed.
Leftist Judges Assume What the Evidence Shows Is False
Leftist judges have based their legal analyses on the assumption that if an 17ma-year-old woman has exclusive SSA, some form of same-sex commitment is her only path to “marriage” because her condition is immutable. But her “condition” has only a 1 percent chance of lasting five years!
On the same factually uninformed assumption, courts argue that businesses that refuse service to such a 17-year-old’s same-sex marriage (you can marry as young as 16 in most states) are discriminating against her for a condition analogous to race. The courts are ready to punish Christian businesses—fine them, re-educate them, and close them down.
Yet there is no question, on the facts, that exclusive same-sex sexual orientation (unlike heterosexual sexual orientation) is extremely unstable, especially among young people. According to hard numbers, by the time the courts are done reeducating a Christian business on a male plaintiff’s immutable homosexuality, he’s probably going to not only be having heterosexual feelings (about a 80 percent chance), but having sex with his girlfriend or wife (about a 50 percent chance).
It’s Not Just Young People, Either
Now, one might argue that this extraordinary instability of sexual orientation is only true for young people. This is a weak objection, since the courts’ ruling must apply to people at least as young as 16. Besides, an immutable characteristic does not fluctuate wildly in early adulthood: “Oh, at 17 I was white; by the time I was 22, definitely black, now quite settled into brown.”
‘Being homosexual’ is rather like ‘being Democrat’ or ‘being Hindu.’
But such objections can also be answered by empirical data on older populations. While no study I am aware of can come close to the Cornell-led study cited above for rigor and sample-size, the data that exists on older populations excludes the possibility that sexual orientation is truly immutable. A 2011 study , for instance, found that a little under 30 percent of those who identified as homosexuals at 40 identified as bisexual or heterosexual by the time they were 50.
Such a high rate of change in self-identification at such a late stage in life indicates that exclusive homosexuality barely enjoys the stability one finds in clearly mutable preferences like religious identification or party affiliation. “Being homosexual” is rather like “being Democrat” or “being Hindu.” The probability of change before your mid-twenties can be quite high. The probability of change in later adulthood is around 40 percent .
Overall, roughly half of those who have identified as homosexuals in the past no longer do, and roughly half of those who currently identify as homosexual used to identify as something else. This rule of thumb (noted, in part or in whole by multiple scholars ) indicates homosexuality is about as stable as religion: roughly half of Americans have changed religions at least once.
Doing Is Therefore Not Being
So, on what basis do the courts claim that homosexuality is inborn and “immutable” so that, for homosexuals, doing is being? The only evidence which, to my knowledge, they have brought to bear on the issue is the APA’s vague statement that homosexuality is “ highly resistant to change. ” The best evidence the APA could muster for this idea was their conclusion that so-called “conversion” therapies—as practiced primarily by a dying breed of Freudian psychologists and a handful of self-appointed counselors—are “unlikely to succeed.”
In point of fact, “conversion therapy” despite its sometimes bizarre methods, tends to enjoy “success” rates similar to other “kick-your-addictions” or “heal-your-sex-life” programs: maybe 15 percent . For comparison, Alcoholics Anonymous has a “success” rate between 5 and 10 percent . The low rate of success such groups enjoy does not by any means prove that homosexuality (or alcoholism, for that matter) is an immutable characteristic. The stats on that question are directly and easily accessible: homosexuality is hardly more immutable than religion or political party.
This brings us back to Gorsuch’s all-important question. Is Phillips’ refusal to make a ‘gay’ wedding cake actually a sly way of discriminating against people with same-sex attraction? The answer is no, in much the same way that Le Bakery Sensual’s refusal to make a traditional marriage celebration cake was not a sly way of discriminating against Christians.
Homosexual behaviors, including same-sex marriage, are no more inborn or immutable than Hindu veganism or Christian abstinence from “sodomy.” A refusal to make two homosexuals a cake for a gay wedding, when paired, as Phillips’ refusal was, with an offer to serve them in any other way , is not some sly strike at an individual for his identity. It is a good-faith objection to a practice, a doing which, as Gorsuch so aptly pointed out, is quite appropriately not the object of laws to protect being.
Jeremiah Keenan is a pro-life activist and freelance writer. He recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he argued with leftists and wrote for The Daily Pennsylvanian. He also earned a bachelors in mathematics and assisted the sociology department researching religious opinion trends on eugenics, race, birth control, and homosexuality. Jeremiah grew up in China and lives, at the moment, in Ohio. He can be contacted at JeremiahJKeenan@gmail.com.
"A refusal to make two homosexuals a cake for a gay wedding, when paired with an offer to serve them in any other way, is not some sly strike at an individual for his identity."
I only ask that you read the entire article before commenting
Either the public service is equal or it isn't. It cannot be halfway and be permitted. "Whites Only" restaurants would serve some black people also long as it was takeout. Would that be permissible to you?
Where in the Bible did Jesus support this behavior, if you claim to be a Christian? Gorsuch claims to be Catholic so he needs to update his beliefs because Pope Frankie disagrees with his current stance.
Gorsuch was never expected to support equal rights because of his religious belifs. He replaced Scalia who also didn't support equal rights for LBT people other so Gorsuch's vote isn't necessary.
Does that go for Christian groups at coffee bars also?
Were those freaks asked to leave because they were Christian or because they were distributing deeply offensive anti-abortion and anti-gay literature? Very few businesses would want hate groups hanging around the premises, but especially not a business owned by one of the minorities which that hate group targets for harm.
The Christian group was not distributing anything inside the store. They were sitting around a table relaxing and taking a rest. The only "freak"that caused any disruption was the idiot manager.
That's what they claimed but a worker did find one of their vile pamphlets in the shop. And it doesn't matter anyway......hate groups aren't a protected class and the business owner has no obligation to serve a hate group which targets people like him for harm.
So you believe some people have more rights than others.
It seems to be conservatives and Christian extremists who are always demanding special rights, but in this case I'm aware that state and local laws only prohibit discrimination which is based on certain protected classes. So the business is free to deny service to these dumb bigots since "homophobic moron" isn't a member of any protected class. Nor are those who distribute graphically offensive pamphlets. Same thing with KKK members who might be denied service......their Christian superstition won't protect them here.
They were served as the law required. They were removed from the establishment after they began to pass out leaflets and annoy other customers.
Why would the protesters patronize a business that 20 minutes prior they were protesting because of the owner's sexuality? Someone needs to explain elementary school level biology to these morons because why else would they be opposing abortion with rainbow flags on abortion literature in an gay-friendly coffee shop? LGBT people cannot get pregnant via natural means so they don't have many abortions. Gay men never get pregnant, but that fact seems to be lost on these relgious dipsticks.
No they did not pass out any leaflets inside the store and the only person that was annoying was the jackasses rump ranger manager.
I will ask again. You think that someone people (the so called protected classes) have more rights than others. Yes or no will do.
Her was not the manager. He was the owner and as long as they were served he could remove them from the business for annoying his patrons.
Why do you have a problem with gay people?
No, they do not have more rights than anyone else. It would be unconstitutional. The concept of protected classes applies to all people. If both sexual orientation and gender identity are protected classes then they also apply equally to you and to me. You are (I'm assuming) heterosexual and CIS, so if you were targeted for crime because of those indelible factors of who you are it would be a hate crime.
So far no conservative here has any clue what a protected class is, how they work or what the scope of those classes is.
Ya, we have all gone through it with you many times. A "protected class" is something that was useful 50 years ago in the deep south but is divisive now. If we are truly equal, there is no need for putting a bubble around any group.
let's see a list...
from: https://content.next.westlaw.com/Document/Ibb0a38daef0511e28578f7ccc38dcbee/View/FullText.html?contextData=(sc.Default)&transitionType=Default&firstPage=true&bhcp=1
hmmm... looks like everyone has a race - guess that's not a bubble around any "group" huh ? ... same with color .. and religion or creed ( since this also protects those with no religion )... National Origin or Ancestry might be a "group" but it should be taken off, right ? and definitely not useful anymore and definitely divisive , right ? ... Sex ? well we all have a biological sex and gender .. so that's not a "group".. we all have an age so that's not a "group" ... Physical or Mental disability - yes, that's definitely a "group" but i guess you feel they don't need protections and we should take them off the list since they are a "group", right ? it's no longer useful and definitely divisive , right ? Veteran Status - yes, that's a group ... they shouldn't be on that list since they are a "group" and we are all equal , right ? it's no longer useful and definitely divisive , correct ?
which "group" do you have a problem with exactly ?
Poor baby.....sounds like you're butt hurt from losing your special rights and privileged status.
It also sounds like you still don't understand what a protected class is, what its scope is or how it works.
Conservatives don't understand that constitutional rights must be equal for all people or what a hate crime is.
Apparently, you don't know what a protected class is, and you didn't bother to read previous replies before posting this. How is a protected class divisive, unless you are upset that some people aren't easy targets for bigots?
Whites commit a hate crime against a minority. They get charged with a hate crime. When minorities commit a hate crime against whites, there is no hate crime charge. You don't think that's divisive?
Right back at ya - "unless you are upset that some people aren't easy targets for bigots?
Do tell, what were they?
Not all crimes against a minority are hate crimes. You need to look at the motive for the crime to determine if it is a hate crime. White Christians can also be the victim of a hate crime if you bothered to educate yourself what a hate crime is and how to understasnd what the perpetrator's motive was. I'd think that you would have watched enough Law and Order re-runs by now to learn this idea.
I specifically said hate crimes - you know the crimes that actually fit the legal definition.
White Christians can also be the victim of a hate crime
No, they cannot! :
Enjoy
If a white person is targeted for a crime because of their skin color or race, that is a hate crime. To claim otherwise is asinine.
Anyone can be a target for a hate crime. The law would not be constitutional otherwise.
It would seem from the linked article that yes blacks are charged with hate crimes.
OK valid point. When a man and a woman are shit faced drunk and they get it on the woman claims she was drunk and therefore unable or doesn't remember if she gave consent, but the man is equally drunk, but only he would be charged. Please fix the world the list is oh so ever long.
They were disrupting his business, he had every right to do what he did.
They were doing no such thing. They were sitting around a table drinking coffee drinks. No one was disrupting the business until he came up yelling and screaming and shooting off his mouth.
Try again,
Why would these people want to patronize a business after they just spent an hour protesting them on the sidewalk? I don't remember LGBT people picketing Chick-Fil-A and then going in and buying chicken sandwiches and waffle fries from those bigots. That is stupid!
That's a truly idiotic and erroneous comment, but it does prove once again that you have no clue what a protected class is, what its scope is or how they work. You also don't seem to be aware of what a hate crime is.
Touche!
Well done. I concede
Thanks for the article
Do you know what you are talking about?
Chick-fil-A NEVER refused to serve LGBT people! A reporter from a religious magazine conducted an interview of Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy in 2012. In that interview Cathy said that he supported traditional family values. That was it! That is what started all the protests and hate from the left.
Actually it was the revelation that he had contributed upwards of $5 million to anti-gay hate groups.
If you bothered to read what I wrote I never said that they refused to serve LGBT people. I said that the anti-choice stooges protesting out front would be stupid to patronize the same gay-owned cofee shop. They spent the previous hours before telling people not to spend money at this gay cofee shop and then they proceed to do the very thing that they were telling others not to do.
They are idiots
That's all that counts - that they don't discriminate in their business! They get to believe what they choose. Remember what Barak Obama said during the 2008 campaign: The White House front-runner said in an interview with MTV he did not support same-sex weddings and believed "marriage is between a man and a woman".
Was Obama a bigot?
They are idiots
Here is what an intolerant idiot looks like:
Remember that?
Get this through your head! Nobody has ever claimed that Chick-Fil-A has ever discriminated against their LGBT customers. The people were protesting the owners support of bigoted groups and their discriminatory legislation.
Most of us assumed that Obama was pandering to religious conservatives among both the DNC and independent voters, until after his second election. At that point he didn't need their support because he would never run for election again. We were correct.
How do 2 LGBT adults marrying the partner of their choice affect you in any way? Why do you care who they marry? Are you secretly jealous? Why do you believe that you deserve a voice on who they marry or how they live?
Obama is on record of saying he supported same sex marriage as far back as 1996.
Your kidding, right? You don't know that Obama went through a change of heart on that issue?
Let me post it again! From 2008:
The White House front-runner said in an interview with MTV he did not support same-sex weddings and believed "marriage is between a man and a woman".
He lied to get elected and you (liberals) knew it? HAHaHa! That's the best one I ever heard. NO, those were Obama's convictions at that time along with most democrat politicians. And that includes the President who passed the Defense Of Marriage Act:
"( AP ) On Sept. 21, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act denying federal recognition of same-sex marriages a day after saying the law should not be used as an excuse for discrimination, violence or intimidation against gays and lesbians. (Although never formally repealed, DoMA was effectively overturned by U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 2013 and 2015.)"
How do 2 LGBT adults marrying the partner of their choice affect you in any way? Why do you care who they marry? Are you secretly jealous? Why do you believe that you deserve a voice on who they marry or how they live?
You can put that away - We are not debating DOMA - we are remembering who was in favor of it and who enacted it. Those politicians like most of the country would later have a change of heart. That's what happened.
Where are you going with this argument?
DOMA is dead and Bill Clinton was a disappointment.
What is your problem with LGBT equality and LGBT marriage rights? Are you upset that other people have rights that you didn't permit them and you refuse to support? Do you get mad when you see a LGBT couple on the street because it is a threat to your white conservative existence? Are their equal rights a slippery slope for you and you feel that you need to retain social power?
Not even a little .
Not quite. Obama has stated he would not support constitutional bans against SSM, nor would he defend DOMA.
And I'll post this :
Or this.
Ultimately, SSM was legalized nationally under his watch too.
I just hope that 5 or more judges rule along the lines of the California case in Bakersfield. That ruling would protect everyone.
What alternate universe do you inhabit? That backward ruling only protects religious fundamentalist's claimed right to discriminate while it puts the civil rights of anyone else in jeopardy.
The judges decision put no ones rights at risk. It says that businesses must serve all people in their ordinary line of work. It says that the bakery must sell anything already made and on display for sale to everyone. It simply says that no one can be compelled to create a work that hasn’t been made yet that would violate their deeply held religious beliefs.
You are trying to defend the policy of seperate but equal, despite the fact that it was struck down 60 years ago in Brown v. Board of Ed.
A wedding cake is obviously part of a bakeries ordinary line of work. If they sell wedding cakes to others then they must sell them to anyone who asks, regardless of their race, creed, color, gender, sexuality or disability. If your religious beliefs are violated by baking a cake then it is you that is the problem. It wasn't caused by someone else. You need to look inward and stop blaming others for your moral failure.
Why won't you answer the question about when did Jesus tell his followers to discriminate?
Firstly, I don't think that last part true. Secondly, any Supreme Court Justices who are taking public opinion into consideration over our settled laws and our Constitution should not be sitting on our Supreme Court...
Have you read some of Judge Kennedy's "legal" opinions?
I have, particularly the ones about equal protection of the law in regards to sexual orientation like Romer v Evans, Lawrence v Texas, Windsor v US and Obergefell v Hodges. I've also read Kennedy's concurrence in Christian Legal Society v Martinez.
I seriously doubt you've read any of them much less understood why the court majority ruled the way they did. And I strongly suspect that you're still confused as to why the dumb bigots lost each of those cases.
i wish this article was more honest:
of course then they go on to cite this study:
and if you google that - you'll find a link to get the pdf:
and at the end of the study you'll find:
(bolding is mine) but wait a minute - why did they leave out part of the statement ? it seems that non heterosexual prevalence rates didn't decline as they'd like to imply and have you believe. Regardless - this is a study of teenagers or younger:
so based upon teenagers - you are going to make the conclusion and imply that same sex attraction is just a "phase" ? seriously ?
Why can't this article just be honest ?
this should tell you all you need to know about the case - they have no problems if the people marrying were opposite gender , so they are basing their discrimination on who the people are and not behavior.
this article is doing a great job of confusing sexual behavior and sexual orientation - they are not exclusive, nor dependent nor an indication of each other and are separate things . Homosexual behaviors ? please define . Homosexual sexual orientation - as inborn and immutable as Heterosexual sexual orientation, you can't separate them out since both are sexual orientations . Next time, can we have a more honest article ?
The Bakersfield, Ca ruling should be the national standard
That would ensure uniformity accost the nation, are you sure that is what you want ? Most of the time you seem against that type of thing.
LOL. Apparently some local judges do pander to dumb bigots when they think it will help them win election. I guess they realize that those dumb bigots won't notice or even care when the ruling is overturned.
How did decorating a cake get to be so damn complicated? I thought the whole argument being used was protecting artistic expression anyway.
The artistic expression belongs to the couple because they decide on what their cake looks like. The baker is paid to create that design in sugar and pastry.
"Lampe, the judge, denied it. He said it did not matter that the baker was not being asked to design particular words on the cake. The wedding alone, with the couple engaging in speech, “could not be a greater form of expressive conduct.”
He compared a bakery to a tire shop, saying that the shop could not refuse to sell a tire to a same sex couple because “there is nothing sacred or expressive about a tire.” Similarly, had the couple just chosen a cake out of a display case, the bakery could not have refused to sell it to
them."
This isn't from the Masterpiece case but it is from a similar case. This is the argument presented before the Court. We'll see how the judges decide. Right now the odds favor the baker.
Lampe is a county-level judge who is unqualified to make constitutional rights decisions and he who chose to pander to the conservative voters that he needs to get re-elected when he ruled for the bakery. He knew that any decision would be appealed, so he chose the safe option in his conservative county.
Your arguments are based on conservative emotions and not logic. There is nothing sacred about a wedding cake. You do not need a cake as part of a wedding ceremony. The cake is not blessed by an officiant. Couples who choose to get married by a secular justice of the peace or a Elvis impersonator can have a cake, which would not be true if the wedding cake was sacred.
I'm just telling you what the basis of the case is. The bakers lawyers are using that argument to make their case. The same reasoning applies to florists and photographers too. Whether it gets rejected or not is anybody's guess.
Actually judge Lampe seems quite confused as to what the basis is for his own ruling. Lampe twists himself in knots trying to rationalize discrimination based on sexual orientation while simultaneously saying that the state's ban on race-based discrimination is legitimate......despite the fact that they're part of the very same public accommodations law. Like the vast majority of conservatives he obviously has no background whatsoever in civil rights law, and he seems unaware that the Unruh civil rights act prohibits exactly this kind of discrimination in both the selling of goods and the provision of services.....like baking a made to order cake.
.
No one who has any knowledge of our legal system thinks that SCOTUS will accept any of these moronic arguments, particularly since they've repeatedly rejected the same arguments for the past 140 years. But if they did it would directly undermine all civil rights laws.
The bakers legal argument is thinner than phyllo dough.
A public business is legally separated from the owner by the fact of incorporation, so the owner cannot use the claim that it is a Christian bakery to deny equal service to others. The fact that our religious rights are constitutionally limited to the right to believe or not belive in god and to worship as we wish. Neither of those ideas are in any way threatened by the legal requirement to serve people, whether they be black, interracial, atheist, Muslim or LBGT, equally in a business they they chose to open and operate voluntarily. The baker, in this case, enjoys numerous remedies that the government provides to them. They can make the business a private establishment where they can pick and choose who they serve. They can stop selling wedding cakes to everyone, or they can sell the business to someone who will obey the rules that are required as part of the business license. It is understood that they can also not be a bigot and just serve others equally.
Freedom of religion is a constitutional principle, but freedom to actively discriminate based on religion is not.
I don't see what the complication is.
If you believe that the Bible condemns homosexuality, fine, keep believing. But you can't take that belief and extend it in your interactions with others in the areas that are covered by their constitutional rights.
More generally SCOTUS settled the underlying issue in 1878 in Reynolds v US. Even Scalia cited this precedent as prohibiting superstition as an excuse to violate a generally applicable law:
.
The biggest problem for the ADF and the bigoted right-wingers on the court is that a ruling in favor of the baker would undermine every non-discrimination law in the country regarding housing, employment and public accommodation.