Their Cake Was Not a First Amendment Issue - NYT Editorial Board
The encounter between David Mullins, Charlie Craig and Jack Phillips in a suburban Denver bakery lasted less than a minute. But it has led to years of litigation, culminating in a date at the Supreme Court, where on Tuesday the justices will hear one of the highest-profile and most emotionally fraught cases of the current term.
Mr. Phillips is the proprietor of Masterpiece Cakeshop, where he makes elaborate wedding cakes and other baked goods. In 2012, Mr. Craig and Mr. Mullins went into the shop hoping to order a cake for their wedding. They had brought along Mr. Craig’s mother and a binder of designs they were considering. Mr. Phillips refused to serve them. Same-sex marriage violates his religious faith, he explained, and baking a cake would represent his endorsement of such a ceremony. (In accordance with his religious beliefs, Mr. Phillips also closes his store on Sundays and refuses to produce cakes with profane messages, or those that celebrate Halloween.)
The couple left in shock. They sued Mr. Phillips under a state law that bars businesses open to the public from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, among other things, and they won. Mr. Phillips appealed on the ground that the law infringed his First Amendment rights to free speech and the free exercise of his religion.
These are among the most revered of our constitutional rights. But Tuesday’s case is not really about them; it’s about discrimination in the public square. Put simply, you can’t offer business services to the general public and then pick and choose your customers because of who they are.
As to Mr. Phillips’s free exercise of religion claim, the Supreme Court has said that the First Amendment is not a license to discriminate in the face of neutral, generally applicable laws like Colorado’s. In 1968, a few years after the Civil Rights Act passed, the court ruled unanimously against the owner of a South Carolina barbecue chain who invoked his religious freedom to refuse to serve black people. The act “contravenes the will of God,” he claimed. The court called that argument “patently frivolous.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/opinion/same-sex-marriage-cake-first-amendment.html?emc=edit_th_20171202&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284&_r=0
= new reply since forum marked as read
But actually get to the same result.
A wedding is a religious sacrament, pursuant to long standing Jewish, Christian, and pretty much every other religion I know about. Religiously, it's on the same list as a baptism, Bris, confirmation, or Bar Mitzva. While I suppose for some people it is a merely civil affair, that is the exception, not the rule.
A wedding is, indeed, also a contract between two (or perhaps more, if Muslim or Mormon) people.
It's a relatively (as in a couple hundred years compared to Judaism's 3500 years) recent phenom that there was ANY government involvement, largely starting in Europe, where Lords took it upon themselves to tax and otherwise regulate the peasants.
For example, in Israel, people get married by the rules of whatever religion they follow and they can (if they choose) register their contract with the government. (There is no "marriage license."
Hence why gay marriage was never a big deal in Israel. Two people could do whatever they wanted.
The rub comes in the USA that the government grants permission to perform a religious rite. Do they regulate a bris? A baptism? Of course not.
That's stupid. The government should simply butt out of the marriage business and let people do what they want. Establish a registry for people who so desire.
(I'm a very libertarian-leaning liberal if you haven't figured it out. I am all for letting stupid people be stupid and letting them deal with the fallout.)
