In Wedding Cake Case, an Advance for Gay Rights?

      Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg opened her dissent from the Supreme Court's decision in the gay wedding cake case by saying that she agreed with "much" of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's opinion for the 7-2 majority. Among other losers, David Cole, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, went further. "We lost the battle, but we won the war," he wrote in an op-ed for newspapers.
      Gay rights advocates in fact walked off with a win of sorts in this week's Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission [June 4], but it is only a beginning, not the end of the war with anti-gay religious conservatives.
      Kennedy opened the substantive sections of his opinion by picking a winner between same-sex couples seeking goods and services for their weddings and Christian business operators unwilling to serve them because of "religious and philosophical objections." Writing with black-letter law certitude, Kennedy declared, as a "general rule," the primacy of civil rights law. "Such objections do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law," he wrote.
      In advance of that general rule, Kennedy made clear that gay persons and gay couples can be — "and in some instances" must be — protected in the exercise of their civil rights. "Our society has come to the recognition," Kennedy wrote and read forcefully from the bench, "that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth."
      A victory, to be sure, but only in those 19 states that include protection for sexual orientation in their public accommodation laws. In the others, same-sex couples denied service have no recourse even if a business operator does not couch bias in religious terms.
      In this case, Charlie Craig and David Mullins end with little to show for the indignity they suffered back in July 2012 when the devout Christian baker Jack Phillips dismissed them from his Masterpiece Cakeshop in suburban Denver. Instead of dwelling on that indignity, however, Kennedy focused on what he and six other justices saw as the "clear and impermissible hostility" that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and the state's court system showed toward Phillips' religious beliefs.
      That hostility consisted in part of remarks by two civil rights commissioners from the two meetings back in 2013 when the seven-member commission considered the staff's recommendation to find Phillips guilty of having violated the state's anti-discrimination law. One commissioner suggested, in Kennedy's summary, that Phillips needed to change his "personal belief system" to do business in the state. The other declared, more provocatively, that religion had been used through history to justify discrimination — including slavery and the Holocaust.
      Kennedy and the others — all but Ginsburg and her dissenting colleague Justice Sonia Sotomayor — found these remarks objectionable, all the more so because no commissioners objected and the state never disavowed them. Further evidence of hostility was the commission's decision not to charge three bakers with civil rights violations by rejecting a customer's religion-based requests for a cake with explicit anti-gay marriage inscriptions.
      Those cases were readily distinguishable from Phillips' even if the rationale was poorly expressed by the commission. And Ginsburg found the commissioners' comments similarly no reason for absolving Phillips for the refusal to serve Craig and Mullins. But Kennedy and the others were so confident in their view that they invalidated the commission's order with no remand to allow reconsideration with the claimed hostility toward religion removed.
      Despite the reversal, experts at the annual meeting of the progressive American Constitution Society this week [June 8] saw more silver lining than cloud. "In many ways, the decision was exactly what we needed--legally and politically," said Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. With the reversal, "religious conservatives feel they have been seen and heard," Minter said, and further to the good they have been "deprived of the opportunity to feed a grievance strategy."
      In a quick confirmation of the civil rights groups' optimistic reading of the decision, the Arizona Court of Appeal cited Kennedy's "general rule" in a decision on Thursday [June 7] rejecting a Phoenix stationery store's plea for an exemption from serving same-sex couples. "If appellants . . . want to operate their for-profit business as a public accommodation, they cannot discriminate against potential patrons based on sexual orientation," the court wrote in Brush & Nib Studio LC. v. City of Phoenix.
      Kennedy closed his opinion with an even-handed admonition that future cases of the sort "must be resolved with tolerance, without undue respect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market." But religious conservatives responded to the decision with exultant claims of victory belying the hoped-for tolerance. In Tennessee, a hardware store owner in a small, remote county posted the kind of sign that Kennedy had warned against: "No Gays Allowed."
      The Supreme Court has seen this story before: the "all deliberate speed" rule to dismantle racial segregation in public education turned into decades of resistance and foot-dragging. With an ambivalent victory, gay couples can expect the same for the foreseeable future.