Post
by eCat » Thu Dec 07, 2017 4:27 pm
The attack versus protect mentality when reading the facts
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On December 5, the Supreme Court heard the case of Jack Phillips, the Christian baker who can’t in good conscience design and create wedding cakes that celebrate same-sex marriages. The justices now will decide whether states, consistent with the First Amendment, can force citizens to express support for same-sex marriage through their artistic products. But this case needn’t have ended up at the Court. And future cases like it can be avoided. Agree or disagree, but Phillips believes he is serving Christ with every cake he makes. He has previously turned down requests to create Halloween-themed cakes, lewd bachelor-party cakes, and a cake celebrating a divorce. He was never reprimanded over those decisions, but the same-sex-wedding cake plunged him into hot water.
Not surprisingly, much of the oral arguments focused on the First Amendment. Phillips argued that making him create a cake that celebrates a same-sex wedding would violate his First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, by forcing him to express a message, and celebrate an event, that runs against his beliefs. If the Court agrees, it will bar Colorado and other states from applying anti-discrimination statutes in such a way. But Colorado should never have applied its statute this way to begin with. Indeed, states can avoid First Amendment showdowns by refusing to view support for traditional marriage as “discrimination.” Part of the problem is that Colorado misunderstood the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges. Colorado claims that the Court held “opposition to same-sex marriage” to be “tantamount to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.” In fact, as Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out during the Masterpiece oral arguments, the Court in Obergefell noted that belief in marriage as the union of husband and wife is held “in good faith by reasonable and sincere people here and throughout the world.”
The Court stated in its majority opinion that “many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises, and neither they nor their beliefs are disparaged here.” The states should not disparage these people and their decent and honorable beliefs, either. A big part of the problem is that sexual-orientation anti-discrimination laws are now being used to “punish the wicked,” in the words of Tim Gill, their biggest financial backer (to the tune of $500 million). But anti-discrimination policies should serve as shields, not swords. They are meant to shield people from unjust discrimination that might prevent them from flourishing in society. They aren’t supposed to be swords used to punish people for acting on their reasonable beliefs. You can see this when considering the history of Colorado’s law. Within a two-year span, Colorado citizens voted to define marriage as the union of husband and wife and to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Many other states, too, simultaneously enacted sexual-orientation non-discrimination policies while insisting that the traditional understanding of marriage is not discriminatory. Justice Samuel Alito pointed to this reality during oral arguments. At the time that Jack Phillips declined to bake a same-sex wedding cake, Colorado wouldn’t even recognize — let alone issue — same-sex marriage licenses. So the same-sex couple couldn’t get the state of Colorado to recognize their relationship as a marriage. “And yet when he goes to this bake shop, and he says I want a wedding cake, and the baker says, no, I won’t do it, in part because same-sex marriage was not allowed in Colorado at the time, he’s created a grave wrong,” Alito stated. “How does that all that fit together?” Indeed.
Colorado should have never declared Phillips to be guilty of discrimination in the first place.
I like the stinky pinky but only up to the first knuckle, I do not want a GD thumb up there--I've told her multiple times and I always catch her when she tries to pull a fast one---it's my butthole for Chrissakes I'm gonna know--so cut out the BS.
