Gay-Hatin' Cake Nazi Wins At SCOTUS, But Religious Right Shouldn't Blow Its Wad Just Yet
Let's start this post with a joke tweeted by Donald Trump Jr., who is not aware he tweeted something funny:
I am reading about a 7 - 2 vote. Pretty sure that's not narrowly... At least 2 dem leaning justices must have agreed. https: //t.co/vOjX0mOHPf
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) June 4, 2018
Dumb fucking fuckhead doesn't know what "narrow" means in the context of court rulings. SHHHHHH, nobody tell him.
The Supreme Court has ruled in the case of Jack Phillips, the Colorado Cake Nazi who hates the gays so much, and who as a CAKE ARTIST does not believe he should be forced to make CAKE ART for gay weddings, because Jesus will roast him on a spit in hell for that. Phillips also believes that, because Colorado did not recognize same-sex marriage in 2012, when all this business went down, he was not in violation of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) -- which specifically prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation -- when he refused to bake a wedding cake for some guys who were total gays.
Here is an example of one of his CAKE ARTS, unless it isn't, in which case we have made an honest journalism mistake:
We imagine Jack Phillips's cakes are AT LEAST that artistic.
Donald Trump Jr. got very confused in his tweet above, but this was indeed an extremely narrow ruling. The fact that big lib dorks Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer signed on to make it a 7-2 majority opinion should tell you as much. It's narrow in that, IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE, the Cake Nazi won, but the ruling doesn't set precedent that allows right-wing Christian assholes to discriminate against LGBT people in the public square, or even particularly against gay weddings, all willy nilly.
The majority opinion, authored by Anthony Kennedy, explicitly states that:
Our society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth. For that reason the laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect them in the exercise of their civil rights. The exercise of their freedom on terms equal to others must be given great weight and respect by the courts. At the same time, the religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression. [...]
[A]ny decision in favor of the baker would have to be sufficiently constrained, lest all purveyors of goods and services who object to gay marriages for moral and religious reasons in effect be allowed to put up signs saying “no goods or services will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages,” something that would impose a serious stigma on gay persons.
Reading the majority opinion, and the concurring opinion from Justice Kagan, it's clear that the issue here is that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission kind of boned the goat in adjudicating whose civil rights were being violated here, in that they were not, in the Court's opinion, "neutral toward religion," i.e. the religious beliefs of the Cake Nazi. Indeed, the Court finds that the commission was "hostile" toward the Cake Nazi's Cake Nazism, or, as he likes to call it, his "religious beliefs." As such, they had to give the Cake Nazi a win this one time .
This passage from the summary seems to invoke the "STOP SAYING THE QUIET PARTS LOUD" clause of the United States Constitution:
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.
The Court notes that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission heard other #CakeCases during this time, involving customers who wanted cakes with gay-hatin' messages on them, but that the commission treated those differently from how they treated Jack Phillips, the poor soul who just wants to be able to hate gays with his Cake Art. The Court seems to be saying Colorado placed the civil rights of the gay couple on a pedestal, while collectively sneering at the Cake Nazi's religious beliefs. And while over here at Wonkette, sneering at super-bigoted religious beliefs is acceptable and also encouraged, it doesn't fly under the Free Exercise clause of the Constitution.
In other words, next time, be nicer to the Cake Nazi, so that SCOTUS may take more kindly to it when you tell him to fuck off.
The religious Right is going to crow -- and crow and crow and crow and crow and crow -- about how this is some huge victory for them. They'll probably try to use it as an excuse to discriminate against gays even more than they already do (and they'll get their asses sued for it). And this decision is shitty, in that it seems to say that businesses owned by Cake Nazis have a very narrow right to discriminate, when those businesses feel their Sincerely Held Religious ARTISTIC FREEDOMS are being violated. (Because corporations are people, natch.)
But to be clear, this ruling does not say businesses can just deny goods and services to the gays and the BLTs because they think Jesus wants them to:
[T]he 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.
In other words, NO PRECEDENT, NO PRECEDENT, YOU ARE THE PRECEDENT!
This was a very specific case involving a very specific Cake Nazi, and a very specific Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and the ruling from SCOTUS essentially says the commission was DOIN' IT 'RONG. (To be clear, Ruth Bader Ginsburg says it's the rest of the Supreme Court who is DOIN' IT 'RONG, and her dissent is worth reading. Not worth reading? Neil Gorsuch's concurring opinion. He is a really dumb guy.)
So, uh ... congrats to the Cake Nazi, we guess.
For the record, SCOTUS didn't rule on whether the #FreeMarket should be allowed to do everything (legal!) in its power to make life real shitty for Masterpiece Cakeshop, Jack Phillips's bakery. Because the #FreeMarket can totally do that, if it wants.
Yelp is a fun place to start!
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[ MASTERPIECE CAKESHOP, LTD., ET AL. v. COLORADO CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION ET AL. ]