On December 5, 2017, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, one of the Christofascists most audacious efforts to undermine the nation's state and federal civil rights laws. Aiding in the effort is Alliance Defending Freedom, a certified hate group, which is now a leading group of "Christian" lawyers litigating cases that aim to grant special rights to discriminate to right wing extremist Christians. While members of the LGBT community are the initial targets of the Christofascist effort to discriminate, the precedent would open the flood gates for other forms of discrimination as long as "religious belief" could be claimed as a justification. Two pieces look at this Christofascist effort and its potentially insidious consequences. Both put forth explanations of why it is crucial that the Court rules against the plaintiff in the case who sees himself above the law. First, these highlights from The Nation which also looks at how Republicans are prostituting themselves to these "godly folk":
On a sunny morning in September, Representative Vicky Hartzler, a Missouri Republican, held a press conference with four of her congressional colleagues to announce their support for Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker. The conservative Christian and “cake artist” had been found in violation of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law when he refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Phillips is now the plaintiff in one of the most closely watched cases on the Supreme Court’s docket this term, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
Hartzler had just spent a good part of her summer pressing for a ban on transgender people in the military because she believes they constitute a “domestic threat.” She was one of 86 Republican lawmakers who had just signed onto an amicus brief supporting Phillips’s novel claim that baking and decorating a wedding cake is constitutionally protected artistic expression. Phillips has also argued that he should not be required to deploy his creative talents on behalf of a same-sex couple, because doing so would violate his religious beliefs.
Nearby, Phillips stood quietly with his attorney, Kristen Waggoner of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has mushroomed over the past few years into a Christian-right powerhouse. Founded 24 years ago because, as its longtime president Alan Sears once put it, “the homosexual agenda threatens religious freedom,”. . . . ADF has positioned itself at the very center of the efforts to curtail LGBTQ rights under the guise of religious freedom.
The preparation of the congressional amicus brief was led by Ted Cruz, the Texas senator and former GOP presidential contender; Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican once rumored to be under consideration by Donald Trump for a Supreme Court seat; and Representative Mike Johnson, a freshman Republican from Louisiana and a rising conservative star.
The involvement of Cruz, Lee, Johnson, and other congressional leaders is just one mark of ADF’s remarkable ascent. . . . . Noel Francisco, Trump’s solicitor general, is an ADF-allied attorney, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions consulted with ADF when drafting Department of Justice guidance on religious-freedom issues. At the state level, at least 18 ADF-affiliated lawyers now work in 10 attorney-general offices; all of them were appointed or elected in the past five years. And in just one year, Trump has nominated at least four federal judges who have ties to ADF—Amy Coney Barrett, recently confirmed to the Seventh Circuit; Kyle Duncan, nominated to the Fifth Circuit; and Jeff Mateer and Michael Joseph Juneau, both nominated to district courts.
At the core of Masterpiece Cakeshop is a radically revisionist idea: that laws protecting the civil rights of historically marginalized groups can violate the free-speech rights of the people who refuse to serve them.
An ADF victory on either claim in Masterpiece Cakeshop, which will be argued before the Supreme Court on December 5, could not only create new precedent but also erode advances in LGBTQ rights, ushering in enduring consequences for LGBTQ people and other protected classes. “We know the possible hurtful effects from the endless examples of how same-sex couples and LGBT individuals have been refused service or turned away in the cases that we’ve litigated,” said Jenny Pizer, law and policy director at Lambda Legal, a national LGBTQ-rights organization.
Pizer said that discrimination occurs in a multitude of public accommodations, including medical, legal, lodging, retail, even access to schools. In its Masterpiece Cakeshop amicus brief, Lambda documented more than 1,000 incidents of LGBTQ people being refused service.
If the Supreme Court were to accept ADF’s religious-infringement claim, Pizer said, “the vulnerability to arbitrary rejection” experienced by LGBTQ people would be present at “any moment during the day when we go through our daily lives—we work, we have to buy food, we have to live somewhere, we have to be able to access medical care, we have to be able to ride transportation services.” And if the Court were to accept ADF’s free-speech claim, Pizer continued, any vendor could simply claim that his or her work is “part of my living my faith, and my faith says I must not make this for you because if I make this for you, I am accepting you, and there’s something about you to which I object on religious grounds.” A ruling supporting either argument would leave “such an enormous hole in the civil-rights laws, there’s really nothing left.”
Note the pernicious way in which ADF is infiltrating the legal system, including federal court appointments made by Donald trump who promised the moon to Christofascists back in June, 2016. A column in the New York Times likewise looks at the dangerous and disingenuous arguments being made by Christofascists in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Here are column excerpts:
At first glance, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case — for which the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments on Dec. 5 — looks easy. In 2012 Charlie Craig and David Mullins attempted to buy a wedding cake at Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo. The owner, an evangelical Christian named Jack Phillips, refused to sell them one. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission found Phillips liable for sexual-orientation discrimination, which is prohibited by the state’s public accommodations law. State courts have upheld the commission’s decision.
The reason the nation’s high court is giving the case a second glance is Phillips’s First Amendment claim that he was not, in fact, discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, but on the basis of a particular message: endorsement of same-sex marriage.
Put aside the plausible objection that treating cakes as speech — especially cakes without writing, as in the Masterpiece case — abuses the First Amendment. And put aside the even more plausible objection that whatever “speech” is involved is clearly that of the customers, not of the baker: As law professors Dale Carpenter and Eugene Volokh explain in a Masterpiece brief, “No one looks at a wedding cake and reflects, ‘the baker has blessed this union.’ ”
Finally, put aside the objection that “It’s just cake!” That could be said to any of the parties in these disputes, and it doesn’t alter the deeper rationale for anti-discrimination laws, which are about ensuring equal access in the public sphere — not just for cakes, flowers, and frills, but for a wide range of vital goods and services.
Phillips’s objection was about to whom it was sold; a user-based objection. The gay couple never even had the opportunity to discuss designs with Phillips, because the baker made it immediately clear that he would not sell them any wedding cake at all. Indeed, Masterpiece once even refused a cupcake order to lesbians upon learning that they were for the couple’s commitment ceremony.
Business owners generally have wide discretion over what they do and do not sell . . . . By contrast, business owners generally do not have discretion over how their products are later used: A kosher bakery may not refuse to sell bread to non-Jews, who might use it for ham-and-cheese sandwiches.
In his defense, Phillips has pointed out that he refuses to sell Halloween cakes or demon-themed cakes; he analogizes these refusals to his unwillingness to sell gay wedding cakes. In other words, he maintains that his turning away the gay couple was about what was requested, not who was requesting it.
The problem with this retort is that “gay wedding cakes” are not a thing. Same-sex couples order their cakes from the same catalogs as everyone else, with the same options for size, shape, icing, filling, and so on. Although Phillips’s cakes are undeniably quite artistic, he did not reject a particular design option, such as a topper with two grooms — in which case, his First Amendment argument would be more compelling. Instead, he flatly told Craig and Mullins that he would not sell them a wedding cake.
We’ve seen Jack Phillips’s First Amendment argument before. Back in 1964, when Maurice Bessinger of Piggie Park BBQ fought public accommodations laws that required him to serve black customers equally, he invoked his rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Bessinger noted that he was happy to sell black customers takeout food; he simply did not want to be complicit in what he saw as the evil of integrated dining. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected this argument.
[T]he underlying principle from Piggie Park holds in the case at hand: Freedom of speech and freedom of religion do not exempt business owners from public accommodations laws, which require them to serve customers equally. The Court should uphold the commission’s decision and rule against Phillips.
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