Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Modernity

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that a Colorado man named Jack Phillips does not have to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seven-to-two majority decision is so carefully and narrowly worded that it’s not entirely clear if everyone else is similarly at liberty, but we’ll chalk it up as a win for religious freedom and freedom in general.

Although Phillips’ does not routinely refuse the services of his Masterpiece Cakeshop to homosexual customers, he did politely decline a homosexual couple’s request for a wedding cake because of his Christian belief that marriage is a union of one man and one woman. Until recently that definition of marriage had been largely unquestioned in western civilization for more than two millennia, and until a relative blink of an eye ago even the likes of President Barack Obama had the same opinion, even now there are still a very large number of people who hold that view, and a fair-minded observer would admit that the social consequences of such changes being so hard to predict there’s still a chance it will ultimately prove wise.

Even if Phillips is wrong, we figure that’s his right. If the Colorado Human Rights Commission can compel him to bake a cake in violation of his religious beliefs, we shudder to think what else an American citizen might be compelled to do. In his decision Kennedy rightly noted that the CHRC seemed to regard the past two millennia of mainstream Christian belief as rank bigotry akin to the Ku Klux Klan’s racist terrorism, and rightly regarded that as an obvious assault on religious freedom, but in doing so he left open the possibility that other human rights commissions could persecute other traditionalists if they do so more politely. Modernity’s assault on the Judeo-Christian foundations of western civilization will surely continue, but for now only two members of the Supreme Court are on record saying that a Christian baker has to bake a gay wedding cake.

That homosexual couple has a right to get married, according to a Supreme Court decision penned by the same Kennedy, and it naturally follows they have a right to buy a cake to celebrate the occasion, but we don’t see why they have any right to force Phillips to bake it. They live in a populous part of Colorado that surely has plenty of bakeries happy to accept their business, and they seem to have turned Phillips into the CHRC in order to punish him for his beliefs and lifestyle, and the CHRC sure did seem to intent on criminalizing those still widely-held beliefs and that common lifestyle. We wish that homosexual couple a happy marriage, but we expect that in the long run they’ll be better off if the government doesn’t get back in the messy business of punishing unfashionable beliefs and alternative lifestyles.

There’s a nutcase cult up in Topeka’s that’s notorious for anti-homosexual protests at funerals and other private occasions, and if they ask some homosexual baker in that town full of desperate-for-business bakers to decorate a cake with their infamous “God Hates Fags” slogan we think that baker has every right to decline the offer. For now the culture wouldn’t tolerate it, and the forces of modernity have even dragged a Christian baker before the Supreme Court and found two Justices who would compel the poor fellow to a bake a cake, but not so long ago in our lifetimes even the New York City cops were raiding gay bars and the consensus of the American Psychiatric Association was that homosexuality was a mental illness. These things can change in the relative blink of an eye, we’ve noticed, and at this point we think it best that tolerance prevails.

We have a lot of Christian and quite a few homosexual friends here in Wichita, and naturally there’s some overlapping on the Venn diagram of our social circle, and of course they all have their own particular opinions about all of this. Happily, they all somehow coexist. Most of our Christians friends have jobs that don’t involve same-sex marriages, and if they did many of them probably decline the work, but none of them are waving any “God Hates Fags” signs at the few same-sex weddings around here and they try their best to be unfailingly polite to everyone they meet in the course of their jobs. Some of our homosexual friends are pretty outspoken about it, but even the most political of them have been bullied and wised-up and worn out enough they would much rather find another bakery rather than drag some pre-modern Christian neighbor all the way to the Supreme Court.

At this point we’re all living an alternative lifestyle,from somebody’s perspective,  and none of our beliefs can possibly keep up with the ever-sharpening blade of the cutting edge of bien pensant opinion, so we figure we’ll just go about business and hope that as usual most people do the same. We hope that Phillips fellow returns to a thriving business at his Masterpiece Bakeshop, and that the homosexual couple has a happy marriage and realizes how lucky they are everyone involved was able to go about their business.

–Bud Norman

The Strange Case of the Gay Wedding Cake

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