Supreme Court's Decision in Colorado "Gay Wedding Cake" Case

[smac97]

1 hour ago, strappinglad said:

Does a sign on a restaurant saying " No shirt  No shoes  No Service " carry any legal weight ? Sounds like discrimination but maybe not against a protected class, but against white male homeless types. What if the sign read " No tattoos , No skin piercings , No service ". Again , discriminatory but not against a protected class so it's OK but now the establishment will start to lose more customers.

Where would  SCOTUS come down if a Muslim baker refused to make a cake that was to have the phrase ," God has bacon for breakfast " on it ?

I forgot to say that the customer was a disabled black woman.

Declining to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding is not discriminatory against a protected class as long as the person refuses to provide that service to anyone, regardless. So if a gay couple is refused such a request, and if one of the gay persons heterosexual parents are also refused such requests, and if the gay couples heterosexual next door neighbors are also refused such a request, and so on, then there does not appear to be discrimination against a protected class. The refusal is not as to the people, but to the goods or services being provided or not provided.

[Storm Rider]

2 hours ago, california boy said:

 

Nope, not the same thing at all.  They were protesting the removal of Confederate statues.  They did not assemble for the purpose of stopping a speaking from speaking or preventing another group from assembling. 

[Gray]

21 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

How should the government sanction me if I decline to provide music for a ss marriage?

You probably don't have a business license, right? I don't think there would be any consequences at all. Now if you set up a business and advertised wedding entertainment services, that's a different story.

Edited June 6, 2018 by Gray

[The Nehor]

2 hours ago, Storm Rider said:

Nope, not the same thing at all.  They were protesting the removal of Confederate statues.  They did not assemble for the purpose of stopping a speaking from speaking or preventing another group from assembling. 

Interestingly Confederate statues were rare right after the Civil War. Robert E. Lee said about one proposed Confederate memorial:

""As regards the erection of such a monument as is contemplated, my conviction is, that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt ... would have the effect of ... continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour."

Most Confederate statues and memorials went up much later....and amazingly coincided with periods of intense agitation for African American civil rights. Veneration of the Confederacy was a cloaked politically correct way of opposing those movements. Those "beautiful statues and monuments" Trump ignorantly blathers on about were rallying cries to fight racial equality.

Then there is the argument that it is denying history. No one wants to take the Civil War out of the history books or shut down history museums. Historical and memorializing are not the same. The latter involves some degree of veneration suggesting respect and honor and other edifying ideals. Would those who support the preservation of Confederate monuments also be okay with the preservation of Hitler statues in Germany because it is part of history? Or keeping Andrew Jackson statues along the Trail of Tears? Just because something is history does not make it worthy of a statue or a memorial.

Oh, and for a funnier take on this: (warning: some expletives)

 

Edited June 6, 2018 by The Nehor

[USU78]

8 hours ago, smac97 said:

Yes.  In fact, it's likely in my view.  SCOTUS all but told the Commission to hide its bigotry.  See here (from yesterday's decision):

As I observed earlier: "I hate to say it, but the translation of this appears to be: 'Hey, Commission, there are, "to be sure," ways to justify the government in compelling a religious person to engage in speech offensive to his religious sensibilities, while also prohibiting the government in compelling secular-minded folks from engaging in speech they find offensive.  You just have to word it right.  Don't be so obvious in your bigotry.'"

See also here (from another attorney's analysis):

However, I think the Commission will have some real difficulty in doing this since they have, in three subsequent cases against bakers asked to decorate cases with anti-gay messages which they found offensive, found that bakers do have a right to refuse to decorate cakes based on the content of the message they are asked to convey.

So how can the Commission say "Yes, secular bakers can refuse to decorate cakes with messages they find offensive, but Christian bakers cannot refuse to decorate cakes with messages they find offensive"?

Thanks,

-Smac

The issue remains votes. Assuming Trump replaces one or two more justices, Ginsburg and Kennedy being the ones most likely to be replaced, we might see a very different kind of result for our baker next go-round.

Given the present makeup of the Court, this was probably the best achievable result obtainable for Religious Freedom.

 

[Bernard Gui]

On 6/4/2018 at 5:08 PM, hope_for_things said:

I listen to Jordan Peterson a lot and I haven’t seen evidence that he would agree with many of the statements made by Smac here.  

Well, there is this that I read today on pages 118-119 of 12 Rules for Life. It applies.

Quote

Even more problematic is the insistence logically stemming from [the] presumption of social corruption that all individual problems, no matter how rare, must be solved by cultural restructuring, no matter how radical. Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous. We have learned to live together and organize our complex societies slowly and incrementally, over vast stretches of time, and we do not understand with sufficient exactitude why what we are doing works. Thus, altering our ways of social being carelessly in the name of some ideological shibboleth (diversity springs to mind) is likely to produce far more trouble than good, given the suffering that even small revolutions generally produce.

 

[Bernard Gui]

1 hour ago, Gray said:

You probably don't have a business license, right? I don't think there would be any consequences at all. Now if you set up a business and advertised wedding entertainment services, that's a different story.

Explain, please. It would appear that the Supreme Court just precluded that. 

[Bernard Gui]

56 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Would those who support the preservation of Confederate monuments also be okay with the preservation of Hitler statues in Germany because it is part of history?

Ahhhh. Godwin's Law in all its glory! 

Quote

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1."

1 has been achieved. 

Edited June 6, 2018 by Bernard Gui

[Scott Lloyd]

Here's a National Review editorial I found by way of Daniel Peterson's blog.

It argues that Monday's Supreme Court ruling is not nearly as "narrow" as liberal news media and others are contending.

Quote

While we believe that the court should have issued a broader ruling, one holding that baking a custom wedding cake is protected expression under the free-speech clause of the First Amendment, its actual ruling is significant. It can potentially shift the language surrounding America’s religious-liberty debate and increase the cost of state favoritism and double standards. In other words, it isn’t nearly as “narrow” as legal progressives would have you believe.

Further:

Quote

While there is little doubt that radical academics and pundits will continue to act in bad faith, their counterparts in the state and local governments will now find that their hostility and double standards carry a cost. On that basis alone, Phillips’s victory is broad enough to earn our applause.

 

Edited June 6, 2018 by Scott Lloyd

[Gray]

9 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

Explain, please. It would appear that the Supreme Court just precluded that. 

So here's some background on public accommodation laws:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000a

It doesn't look like you as a private musician meet the definition of the establishments affected by public accommodation laws.

There may be other state laws that deal with this topic, but I doubt they'd apply to your situation either.

 

Edited June 6, 2018 by Gray

[Amulek]

8 hours ago, Scott Lloyd said:

Here's a National Review editorial I found by way of Daniel Peterson's blog.

It argues that Monday's Supreme Court ruling is not nearly as "narrow" as liberal news media and others are contending.

You can find a similar take over on SCOTUS Blog, here: http://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/symposium-masterpiece-cakeshop-not-as-narrow-as-may-first-appear/

There are several good points made there, including some which have already been touched on:

Quote

In the most egregious of the hostile statements, one commissioner blamed religion and religious freedom for slavery and the Holocaust and added that “it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to—to use their religion to hurt others.” The Supreme Court held such statements “inappropriate” in an adjudicatory body charged with “fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law.”

Views of this sort are very common among those opposed to religious exemptions from anti-discrimination laws. [...] Enforcement authorities have now been warned not to state such views on the record, so the views will mostly go underground, but they will still drive decisions. 

I think that's pretty much right. The motivation will remain the same for many, but the doctrinal and rhetorical manipulations will shift in order to satisfy the court's standards for "neutrality and general applicability." 

 

[hope_for_things]

10 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

Well, there is this that I read today on pages 118-119 of 12 Rules for Life. It applies.

 

Its an interesting quote, thanks for sharing.  Pretty broad principles being discussed though.  

[Bernard Gui]

37 minutes ago, hope_for_things said:

Its an interesting quote, thanks for sharing.  Pretty broad principles being discussed though.  

No worries! And applicable to this issue.

[Bernard Gui]

2 hours ago, Gray said:

So here's some background on public accommodation laws:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000a

It doesn't look like you as a private musician meet the definition of the establishments affected by public accommodation laws.

There may be other state laws that deal with this topic, but I doubt they'd apply to your situation either.

 

Thanks for the info. It’s not clear to me how a cake maker meets the definition.

Edited June 6, 2018 by Bernard Gui

[Gray]

9 minutes ago, Bernard Gui said:

Thanks for the info. It’s not clear to me how a cake maker meets the definition.

I would assume he has a storefront business? It would probably be helpful to check out the applicable Colorado laws as well

Edited June 6, 2018 by Gray

[california boy]

From the Washington Post.  A pretty wide majority believe that business should not discriminate because of their religious beliefs.  We rarely get 72% of Americans agreeing on anything.  Perhaps this is why the Supreme Court punted on this verdict.  Maybe even more interesting is that only 14% of Americans believe religion has a right to discriminate based on religious beliefs.  That is a very small percentage of people who think that way.  

 

Quote

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly three quarters of U.S. adults believe that businesses should not have the right on religious grounds to deny services to customers based on their sexual orientation, a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Monday showed.

The findings of the poll, conducted Friday to Monday, were issued on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a baker from Colorado who had refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, citing his Christian beliefs.

In the poll, 72 percent of respondents said business owners, because of their religious beliefs, should not be allowed to refuse to serve customers based on sexual orientation, while 14 percent said they do have that right. Another 9 percent said businesses have the right “only in certain circumstances” and 6 percent said they do not know.

Like other recent surveys of American adults, the Reuters/Ipsos poll also found that the number of Americans who support gay marriage has increased in recent years. In the poll, 53 percent of respondents said same-sex couples should be allowed to marry legally, with all the same rights as marriages between a man and a woman. This is up from 42 percent who said so in a similar Reuters/Ipsos poll in late 2013.

The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide in a landmark 2015 decision.

The poll also asked a more general question about how much leeway businesses should have to reject any customer for religious reasons. Fifty-seven percent of respondents agreed that business owners “never have the right to deny services to customers,” even if their denial is based on religious beliefs.

Another 19 percent said businesses “always have the right to deny services” and 24 percent said they can deny services “in only some instances.”

The Reuters/Ipsos survey collected responses online in English throughout the United States from 722 American adults. It had a credibility interval, a measure of the poll’s precision, of 4 percentage points.

Reporting by Will Dunham

 

 

Edited June 6, 2018 by california boy

[carbon dioxide]

On method a baker could do is put a signature saying on all of his cakes "Marriage is between man and woman".  All wedding cakes have it and on can not get one without it.  It would be up to the gay couple to decide if they want a cake with that on it.

[kllindley]

3 hours ago, carbon dioxide said:

On method a baker could do is put a signature saying on all of his cakes "Marriage is between man and woman".  All wedding cakes have it and on can not get one without it.  It would be up to the gay couple to decide if they want a cake with that on it.

That is really an interesting idea. I can't immediately come up with any reason that would be illegal or discriminatory. Though I don't put that past other people to find some way to vilify it. 

[smac97]

7 minutes ago, kllindley said:

Quote

On method a baker could do is put a signature saying on all of his cakes "Marriage is between man and woman".  All wedding cakes have it and on can not get one without it.  It would be up to the gay couple to decide if they want a cake with that on it.

That is really an interesting idea. I can't immediately come up with any reason that would be illegal or discriminatory. Though I don't put that past other people to find some way to vilify it. 

It sort of looks like a form of civil disobedience.  And it falls squarely within the protections of the Free Speech clause (and perhaps the Free Exercise clause as well).

Thanks,

-Smac

[Scott Lloyd]

22 hours ago, smac97 said:

Declining to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding is not discriminatory against a protected class as long as the person refuses to provide that service to anyone, regardless. So if a gay couple is refused such a request, and if one of the gay persons heterosexual parents are also refused such requests, and if the gay couples heterosexual next door neighbors are also refused such a request, and so on, then there does not appear to be discrimination against a protected class. The refusal is not as to the people, but to the goods or services being provided or not provided.

True. 

If they had wanted a celebratory cake for another purpose — birthday, graduation, promotion, bon voyage, homecoming, retirement — he would have made it for them. 

As the SCOTUS ruling mentions, three other bakers in Colorado had refused to make anti-gay marriage cakes for customers who wanted it done, and the same civil rights commission had found the refusal lawful because of the offensive nature of the desired product, not because the customers were of a certain class. 

Edited June 6, 2018 by Scott Lloyd

[Anijen]

Question: I have been accused of being a racist by subscribing to Phillips view and his decision to not make the wedding cake for the SS couple. Sometimes it is blatant; "Jeff [Anijen]  if you agree with Phillips you then are a racist." Sometimes is thinly veiled such as; "Jeff substitute African American for every time you use the word gay customer. you are taking the view that racists take and have taken in the past." How should I reply? How do I say, "for me it has nothing to do with race, but my religious views?" How do I get that point across?

I really would like your opinion here (specifically Smac97 and Scott Lloyd)

[Scott Lloyd]

5 hours ago, california boy said:

From the Washington Post.  A pretty wide majority believe that business should not discriminate because of their religious beliefs.  We rarely get 72% of Americans agreeing on anything.  Perhaps this is why the Supreme Court punted on this verdict.  Maybe even more interesting is that only 14% of Americans believe religion has a right to discriminate based on religious beliefs.  That is a very small percentage of people who think that way.  

 

 

Considering that the intent of the Bill of Rights is to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority, I’m not too impressed that a majority, however wide it might be, thinks that people’s First Amendment rights should be ignored or violated. 

[Scott Lloyd]

5 minutes ago, Anijen said:

Question: I have been accused of being a racist by subscribing to Phillips view and his decision to not make the wedding cake for the SS couple. Sometimes it is blatant; "Jeff [Anijen]  if you agree with Phillips you then are a racist." Sometimes is thinly veiled such as; "Jeff substitute African American for every time you use the word gay customer. you are taking the view that racists take and have taken in the past." How should I reply? How do I say, "for me it has nothing to do with race, but my religious views?" How do I get that point across?

I really would like your opinion here (specifically Smac97 and Scott Lloyd)

For my part, I think such accusations reflect idiocy. Refusal to act in a manner that violates one’s religious values has nothing to do with racism. 

You might want to read through the SCOTUS decision (Smac97 linked to it earlier) to view the contempt in which the high court held such stupidity from members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. They are, in fact, the basis on which SCOTUS held in favor of Mr. Phillips. 

[Bernard Gui]

3 hours ago, Anijen said:

Question: I have been accused of being a racist by subscribing to Phillips view and his decision to not make the wedding cake for the SS couple. Sometimes it is blatant; "Jeff [Anijen]  if you agree with Phillips you then are a racist." Sometimes is thinly veiled such as; "Jeff substitute African American for every time you use the word gay customer. you are taking the view that racists take and have taken in the past." How should I reply? How do I say, "for me it has nothing to do with race, but my religious views?" How do I get that point across?

I really would like your opinion here (specifically Smac97 and Scott Lloyd)

That happened here when I raised the issue of playing music for weddings. If people do not respect your religious views, or at least acknowledge them as not being malevolent, IMO not much can be said to change their minds.

Edited June 7, 2018 by Bernard Gui

[Scott Lloyd]

3 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

That happened here when I raised the issue of playing music for weddings. If people do not respect your religious views, or at least acknowledge them as not being malevolent, IMO not much can be said to change their minds.

I heard something a few days ago that has stayed in my mind: conservatives think liberals are stupid,; liberals think conservatives are evil. Of the two attitudes, the latter strikes me as the more dangerous.