On Tuesday the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which makes for an interesting argument.
The Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver has a reputation for baking and decorating excellent cakes for most occasions, but despite that and the business’s slightly gay-sounding name the sole proprietor and master baker Jack C. Phillips holds to some unfashionably old-fashioned Biblical opinions about homosexuality and other controversial matters. When a homosexual couple asked Phillips to bake and decorate a cake in celebration of their upcoming nuptials, which have been blessed by a decision of the United States Supreme Court, Phillips politely declined the request based on his religious convictions, and thus he wound up afoul of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and after years of expensive litigation stands before the Supreme Court.
We won’t pretend to understand all the legal concepts involved, especially in the wake of that confounding Obergfell v. Hodges decision giving the Supreme Court’s blessing on same sex-marriages for arguable social justice reasons but with no apparent basis in any plain reading of the Constitution or common law or the past millennia of western civilization, but we more viscerally understand the issue on a personal basis. It’s complicated, of course, but we’re hoping that Phillips and his slightly gay-sounding Masterpiece Cakeshop prevail in the case.
Which is not to say we don’t understand the complicated issues involved in this gay-sounding case. We’re not only old-fashioned Christians but old-fashioned Republicans and strict constitutionalists as well, yet we’re also big fans of poetry and Broadway musicals and genteel manners who have somehow wound up with a suspicious number of homosexual friends over the years, and we have a few lesbians on our block who have proved excellent neighbors, and so far we’ve managed very cvil relations. This gives us hope the Supreme Court will arrive at something as sensible.
A couple of the young women we took an avuncular interest in when they were born have turned out to be lesbians, and one of them has married another woman with the blessings of the United States Supreme Court and her President Donald Trump-loving father, and we have longstanding friendships with a couple of men who have long considered themselves married without the Supreme Court’s blessings, and we’ve also seen quite a few of our friends’ homosexual relationships that didn’t last any longer than any of our heterosexual relationships, and by now we lean on the scriptures about judge not lest ye be judged, and we wish all our loved ones well. Nor do we judge that artistic baker in Denver who objects to homosexual marriage, though, and we hope the Supreme Court will take a similarly forgiving attitude.
By all accounts, which by now have been long attested to under oath, the baker doesn’t withhold his usual services from homosexual customers. If you’d walked into his shop and declared yourself a homosexual customer wanting to buy a birthday cake for a homosexual friend he would have happily taken the order, and regardless of whether you’re straight or gay he’d have declined a request to bake a Halloween cake on religious grounds. Nothing in our old-fashioned Christian and Republican souls objects to trick-or-treating on Halloween, but both our Christian and libertarian instincts tell us he should have the right.
Those got-durned liberal fashion designers who decline to design dresses for President Donald Trump’s third First Lady deserve the same right, and so does any black baker who declines to decorate a cake with a confederate flag, and so does any homosexual baker who declines the Westboro Baptist Church’s request for a “God hate fags” cake. Outside of the legal arguments and here on the personal level, there’s no way of restricting one person’s liberty without eventually restricting the liberty of someone on the other side of political or cultural divide.
Several of our homosexual friends are close enough that we’ve discussed these issues with them frankly, and they’ve all said that if they wanted to get married with the federal government’s blessing they’d just find another bakery rather than take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Wichita’s a big enough city they could surely find another baker, as is Denver, and like us they’re not the sorts to make an unnecessary fuss. They have a heightened awareness that a certain level of tolerance for a wide variety of longstanding views about things is necessary to maintain a civil society, or even a personal relationship with old friends, s9 maybe the Supreme Court will prove just as wise.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 