SCOTUS on Wedding Cakes

For John, BLUF:  This could have gone so wrong....  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

BREAKING:  Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Colorado Baker in Gay Wedding Cake Case

From PJ Media, by Ms Paula Bolyard, 4 June 2018.

Here is the lede plus four:

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who was sanctioned for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, was told by a Colorado Civil Rights Commission that he cannot refuse to bake cakes for events that violate his conscience, even though he had a long history of selling items in his cakeshop to anyone who walked through the door.  Phillips, citing his Christian faith, said his conscience would not allow him to design cakes for events like divorce parties, lewd bachelor parties, or same-sex weddings.

Colorado ordered him to either make cakes for same-sex weddings or stop making cakes at all.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that "The laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect gay persons and gay couples in the exercise of their civil rights, but religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression."  Citing Obergefell v. Hodges, the justices wrote that the Commission's treatment of Phillips' case:

...showed elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection.  As the record shows, some of the commissioners at the Commission’s formal, public hearings endorsed the view that religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried into the public sphere or commercial domain, disparaged Phillips’ faith as despicable and characterized it as merely rhetorical, and compared his invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust.  No commissioners objected to the comments.  Nor were they mentioned in the later state-court ruling or disavowed in the briefs filed here.  The comments thus cast doubt on the fairness and impartiality of the Commission’s adjudication of Phillips’ case.

But, it isn't clear to me that we have a definitive ruling.  What we have is a ruling that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission overstepped.

Here is what the legal blogger at Popehat had to say, in part:

I don't think 'just stop being so overtly hostile to religiously-based beliefs' is the easy fix some people think it is for Civil Rights Commissions.  It appears ingrained, rather self-righteously, into the subculture.

There is this, from the ACLU, via Popehat:

.@ACLU calls the Masterpiece case — they represented gay couple — a non-loss, saying SCOTUS ruled "based on concerns unique to the case but reaffirmed its longstanding rule that states can prevent the harms of discrimination in the marketplace, including against LGBT people.”

This is not over.

However, for now, the crazies have not been unleashed, on any side, to make ridiculous and extreme demands on people in the marketplace.  Like Nazis asking a Jewish or Black bakery to do a Birthday Cake on Hitler's Birthday.  (20 April, in case you were wondering.)

UPDATE:  Link to the Ruling.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff