June 5, 2018 | Sex & Society

US Supreme Court rules: no wedding cake for the gays

Yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 7-2 that anti-gay baker Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, had not received fair consideration of his religious beliefs when fined by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor were the two judges to dissent.

However, the decision was not an outright win for the religious right. As Justice Kennedy wrote in the court's decision, the court was only ruling on the specifics of this case. 

“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," he wrote. "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.”

The ACLU released the following statement:

The Supreme Court today reaffirmed the core principle that businesses open to the public must be open to all in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The court did not accept arguments that would have turned back the clock on equality by making our basic civil rights protections unenforceable, but reversed this case based on concerns specific to the facts here. The American Civil Liberties Union argued the case on behalf of Charlie Craig and David Mullins, who were refused service at a Colorado bakery because they are a same-sex couple.

Basically, if the Commission had approached Phillips' views in a more "thoughtful" way, the court may have allowed the Commission's findings to stand. This means there will have to be other, similar cases that make their way to the high court before there is any real clarity on this issue.

“The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts, all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market," Kennedy wrote.

Not everyone is convinced the decision doesn't come with major consequences to human rights.

“Very disappointed in what the Supreme Court did,” says Greg Harris, an Illinois State Representative who fought for same-sex marriage in his state. “Essentially they created a right to discriminate today where individual businesses can pick and choose which customers they would like to have and apparently can now turn down customers based on some characteristic such as sexual orientation, race, religion or something else. I think this’ll set a very bad precedent.”

Looks like we're a long way off from a final say on the whole same-sex wedding cake issue.

Supreme Court rules for Colorado baker in same-sex wedding cake case [CNN]

SCOTUS Cake ruling: “A dangerous precedent” [WLS 890 AM]

Gays Can’t Have Their Cake, SCOTUS Rules: ANALYSIS [Towle Road]