Justice Dept. sides with baker who refused to serve gay couple

[Beet]

"In a major upcoming Supreme Court case that weighs equal rights with religious liberty, the Trump administration on Thursday sided with a Colorado baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

The Department of Justice on Thursday filed a brief on behalf of baker Jack Phillips, who was found to have violated the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act by refusing to created a cake to celebrate the marriage of Charlie Craig and David Mullins in 2012. Phillips said he doesn’t create wedding cakes for same-sex couples because it would violate his religious beliefs."

"The DOJ also has taken the stance that gay workers are not entitled to job protections under federal anti-discrimination laws. Since 2015, the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission has taken the opposite stance, saying Title VII, the civil-rights statute that covers workers, protects against bias based on sexual orientation."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/in-major-supreme-court-case-justice-dept-sides-with-baker-who-refused-to-make-wedding-cake-for-gay-couple/2017/09/07/fb84f116-93f0-11e7-89fa-bb822a46da5b_story.html

[Beet]

1. If SCOTUS rules in favor of the baker, it will likely make some sort of statement on the scope of the decision, and as the chief interpreters of the constitution, SCOTUS has the freedom to set the scope of any decision it makes. It could say that the ruling is narrow, and applies only to wedding cakes. Or it could essentially say that the ruling endorses the full "First Amendment Defense Act". Or something in between.

2. I would prefer this matter is settled through the passage of a scaled back version of the Democrats' 'Equality Act of 2017'. It would be very easy to start from that framework and add any necessary exceptions, including the wedding exception.

The court will be weighing whether or not a business owner's first amendment rights trump a state's power to pass broad anti-discrimination laws regulating private businesses. Yes, this particular case is about a baker with a religious objection to gay marriage. But if a conservative majority of the Court rules in favor of the baker, the Court will be holding that the legislature's anti-discrimination measures must give way where such regulation conflict's with a business owner's sincerely held religious beliefs. In that case, the Court may very well make clear that its holding is limited to "small businesses" and/or to individualized services like custom cake-making. Yes, the Court would articulate some sort of test for determining when a business's religious concerns trump anti-discrimination measures. But there is absolutely no scenario under which the precedent established by such a ruling could be limited to just wedding cakes (or to discrimination against gays for that matter).

I can see the legal and Constitutional arguments on both sides of this case, but if we're going to have this debate we should be clear on what a ruling in favor of one side or the other would mean.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. That's the real danger here. All this stuff about wedding cakes is a red herring.