Either the baker in question should do a better job of serving his customers--all of them--or face the fact that people will complain about his terrible service, as they should, and likely avoid supporting his business.
The market would take care of that. If more people hate the baker than like the baker, the baker would probably go out of business.
Would you support forcing the baker to include an array of penises or a little tableau of anal sex in the cake decoration? (People do make cakes like that, you know. Yes, it's an edge case, but that's kind of the whole point here.)
As I understand the facts in this case, the couple did not ask him to do anything special with the cake. No wording or images were discussed. The baker simply refused to sell the couple any kind of wedding cake.
If said couple had asked the baker to bake a cake like you describe, he could have said, "Making such a cake would involve me in the creation of what I consider to be pornographic images. I'm happy to sell you a cake, but you will need to find someone else to decorate it."
Selling a cake is one thing; decorating it is quite another. The couple never got around to discussing the decoration in this case, since the baker refused outright to sell them a cake of any kind. At least this is what the lawyer for the couple has alleged in the lawsuit.
Matt Becker
If the facts were as you describe them, I would agree with you. Unfortunately I understand them to be otherwise. From the
certiorari petition of the defendent, describing one of the facts of the case:
Jack Phillips is a cake artist. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that he engaged in sexual orientation discrimination under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (“CADA”) when he declined to design and create a custom cake honoring a same-sex marriage because doing so conflicts with his sincerely held religious beliefs.
...
Jack Phillips is an artist. He has created elaborate custom cakes for over two decades. His cakes communicate the important celebratory themes of birthday parties, anniversaries, graduations, and weddings. His faith teaches him to serve and love everyone and he does. It also compels him to use his artistic talents to promote only messages that align with his religious beliefs. Thus, he declines lucrative business by not creating goods that contain alcohol or cakes celebrating Halloween and other messages his faith prohibits, such as racism, atheism, and any marriage not between one man and one woman. But Colorado has ordered him to create custom wedding cakes celebrating same-sex wedding ceremonies.
While advocates certainly shade the facts in court filings, submitting something untrue, especially before the U.S. Supreme Court, can result in sanctions, not to mention just outright losing, so I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this description.
I have read elsewhere that the defendant did not object to the plaintiffs buying anything off-the-shelf, but in my quick review of the filings I can't find mention of that one way or the other. What the quotation does show is that the defendant is not a one-trick pony with his religious objections. It is not something he just invented to avoid working with the plaintiffs. And indeed, when the incident occurred, same-sex marriage was not (yet) legal in Colorado.
While I understand the plaintiffs' and their supporters' desire to make this about the sexual orientation of the customer, the facts point in another direction. There is no evidence that the defendant ever denied his services to gay people for any other reason other than a wedding cake.
UPDATE:
If a Christian baker holds an anti-gay position that leads him/her to refuse a basic service to gay people (a service that he/she provides everyone else as a part of his/her public business), he/she should get out of the business (since civil law requires that the baker not discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual orientation) OR he/she should keep quiet about his/her anti-gay views while he/she does his/her level best to serve all clients equally well.
I'm not sure what an anti-gay position is, but the totality of your statement is begging the question. How far we have traveled from "if you don't want a gay marriage, don't enter one." I wasn't aware the First Amendment allowed the government to quash commercial speech that has a religious basis. The
Hobby Lobby decision said otherwise.
UPDATE2: Found something reading the petition more closely. According to the defendant:
The First Amendment prohibits the government from telling private citizens “what they must say.” Agency for Int’l Dev. v. Alliance for Open Soc. Int’l, Inc., 133 S. Ct. 2321, 2327 (2013). It is undisputed that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission the “Commission”) does not apply CADA to ban (1) an African-American cake artist from refusing to create a cake promoting white-supremacism for the Aryan Nation, (2) an Islamic cake artist from refusing to create a cake denigrating the Quran for the Westboro Baptist Church, and (3) three secular cake artists from refusing to create cakes opposing same-sex marriage for a Christian patron.
Neither should CADA ban Jack Phillips’ polite declining to create a cake celebrating same-sex marriage on religious grounds when he is happy to create other items for gay and lesbian clients. This still doesn't rule out refusing to sell an off-the-shelf wedding cake...but I don't know whether he makes any such thing. Perhaps all his wedding cakes are custom.
Sterling Spatz
