Baking Wedding Cakes For All, Or None

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH BASED BAKERY in Colorado which refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple and was convicted of discrimination by Colorado law, will have its day, actually about thirty minutes, in Supreme Court. They will argue, of course, that by being forced to cater to gay customers, they are being forced to violate their religious beliefs. The other side will argue that, when someone goes into business, the business operates with the permission of the public, and must therefore serve the public, all of it, regardless of race, gender, creed, sexual orientation, and all that. Assuming history and precedent is any indicator of the outcome, the bakery will lose, and will be required to bake wedding cakes for all betrothed or none, including gay couples. For awhile now this bakery has suspended baking wedding cakes for everyone, including the heterosexual marital community, and by having done so has lost about forty percent of its revenue, so say the owners. This might be the final solution. That seems like a heap of lost revenue for the sake of religiosity; and a testament to the sincerity of the bakery owner's beliefs. A spokesperson for the bakery, perhaps its attorney, posed a hypothetical in which a pro choice bakery might be required to bake a cake with the message "abortion stops heartbeats" inscribed upon it. Or that a bakery owned by Muslims might be required to put a depiction of the Christian holy trinity on a cake. One obvious answer to this clever hypothetical ploy is that whether or not one is pro choice or pro life, abortion does indeed stop the beating of a heart, and that therefore the presentation of this message cannot be considered objectionable to anyone. Whether one is a Muslim baker or not, placing a depiction of the Christian trinity on a cake does not in any way imply implicitly or explicitly that the cake baker believes in the Christian trinity, but rather, that the customer does. Baking a cake for a gay couple does not, or need not have anything to do with whether the bakery approves of homosexuality. Besides, a gay couple wanting a wedding cake, merely by wanting a cake, is not presenting any political, social, or religious message, such as the trinity or a stance on the abortion issue. They are simply wanting to have a wedding cake. We have a conservative Supreme Court, so conservatives might be expecting the court, when its decision is handed down in June, to affirm the right of Christian bakers to refrain from making wedding cakes for gay couples, while making cakes for straight couples. They are likely to be disappointed. Recent court rulings, on Obamacare and gay marriage, for example, came from the conservative Supreme Court, in which conservative justices rendered rulings favorable to liberals, rather than conservatives, thus transcending their personal ideology for the sake of well rendered, logical law. Liberals need not fear conservative justices. When the liberal position is the correct one, such as in the right of a gay couple to do business with a business which serves the general public, its position will prevail, as it will almost certainly this time.