The United States Supreme Court has overruled a finding that a Colorado baker’s refusal to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple was unlawful discrimination. The 7-2 majority decision was based on the conduct of the hearing of the case by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which the justices held was ‘inconsistent with the State’s obligation of religious neutrality’.
Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakes in Colorado refused to sell a wedding cake to David Mullins and Charlie Craig when they visited his shop in 2012. Phillips cited his devout Christian beliefs in refusing to produce a cake for the gay couple’s wedding but said that he would sell them other products in his shop such as birthday cakes. The couple filed a discrimination complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. Same-sex marriage has been legal in the United States since the 2015 landmark decision in Obergefell v Hodges.
Phillips based his defence on freedom of speech and freedom of exercise of religion under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. He also contended that he was not unreasonable in refusing to sell a cake for a same-sex wedding when such marriages were not legal in Colorado at the time. His defence failed before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and failed on appeal to the Colorado state court. On appeal to the Supreme Court, the justices found that the handling of Phillips’ case by the Commission had displayed ‘a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated [Phillips’] objection’, overturning the findings of the lower courts.
The Supreme Court justices found that the Commission had displayed a bias against religion in its hearing of Phillips’ case. They took issue with the implication by the Commission at the hearing that ‘religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried into the public sphere or commercial domain’, and with comparisons being drawn between ‘Phillips’ invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs [and] defence of slavery and the Holocaust’. The justices also criticised the disparaging description of religion as ‘despicable’ and ‘rhetoric’. They noted that the laws invoked by the Commission which prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation also exist to prohibit discrimination on the basis of religion.
The verdict is a victory for Jack Phillips but the narrow reasoning, confined as it is to the specifics of the case, is not an unqualified victory for those who support the use of the First Amendment to discriminate in the provision of so-called expressive products. The Trump Justice Department supports the right of business owners such as Phillips to discriminate in the provision of ‘inherently expressive products’ like wedding cakes for same-sex marriages where such marriages are fundamentally contrary to their conservative Christian views.
However, Justice Anthony Kennedy mentioned in the court’s opinion that ‘it is a general rule that [religious and philosophical] objections do not allow business owners… to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law’. Kennedy acknowledged at the end of the judgement that ‘[t]he outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts’.
Click here for the judgement in Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd v Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
Click here for analysis by BBC News.