Cakes for Gay Weddings: The Masterpiece Cakeshop Decision

It will be interesting to see how the commentariat reacts to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which was announced today.  While at least some supporters on both sides of the issue will probably get carried away, the decision itself, at least as I understand it, was fairly narrow.  Specifically, the Court held that the Commission had violated the rights of Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, under the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment by the way it treated him and his claim of religious belief for what he did.  The Court did not, however, say the Commission violated Mr. Phillips’s rights by telling him that he had to make a cake for a gay wedding.  It left that question for another day.  Rather, the Court held that the Commission violated Mr. Phillips’s rights by showing, in the words of the Court’s Syllabus of the case,

“a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection.  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 held that that the Commission’s treatment of Mr. Phillips’s case, once again in the words of the Syllabus, “violated the State’s duty under the First Amendment not to base laws or regulations on hostility to a religion or religious viewpoint.”

The Court specifically did not say whether, in a proper case, where the Commission, etc., was not hostile to a business owner’s religious beliefs, it might not hold that a business owner might be forced to make a cake.  The Court merely re-emphasized that the state cannot be hostile to religious beliefs.  That seems to me to be a fairly obvious point.  But the Colorado Commission apparently needed to be reminded of it. 

The decision leaves a lot of questions for another day.  What will be interesting, however, as I said above, will be to see how many of those commenting on the decision will recognize the narrowness of the decision and how many will go off the deep end.  My bet is that there will be more of the latter than the former.