Kramer Law LLC

It is important not to overlook that the Court reiterated critical equality and nondiscrimination principles in the Masterpiece Cake case. (See excerpt below.) KF commends this excellent opinion piece by one of the lawyers representing the men whose cake the baker wouldn't make and urges everyone to remember that there is no exception to antidiscrimination law for moral or religious objection, even if the belief sincerely held.

"Our society has come to the recognition that gay persons and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth. For that reason the laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect them in the exercise of their civil rights. The exercise of their freedom on terms equal to others must be given great weight and respect by the courts. At the same time, the religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression. ... Nevertheless, while those religious and philosophical objections are protected, it is a general rule that 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.
When it comes to weddings, it can be assumed that a member of the clergy who objects to gay marriage on moral and religious grounds could not be compelled to perform the ceremony without denial of his or her right to the free exercise of religion. This refusal would be well understood in our constitutional order as an exercise of religion, an exercise that gay persons could recognize and accept without serious diminishment to their own dignity and worth. Yet if that exception were not confined, then a long list of persons who provide goods and services for marriages and weddings might refuse to do so for gay persons, thus resulting in a community-wide stigma inconsistent with the history and dynamics of civil rights laws that ensure equal access to goods, services, and
public accommodations."

Opinion | I represented the wedding cake couple. We lost a battle but won the war. Charlie Craig and David Mullins could go back into Masterpiece Cakeshop and request a cake — and Jack Phillips would have no First Amendment right to turn them away.