What If Masterpiece Cakeshop Loses?
by Rick Plasterer, LifeSite:
Although the oral arguments and decision in the crucial case of Masterpiece Cakeshop vs. the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, discussed by this writer last month, are months away, it is not too soon to consider what the response of Christians should be if Jack Phillips loses his case, or if in prevailing the principle the court lays down is so narrow it does not provide protection in future similar cases, or in markedly different cases where religious freedom is the basic factor.
That we have Masterpiece Cakeshop and similar cases at all is due to very bad mangling of law and logic by the Supreme Court in an effort to relieve the suffering of homosexuals under traditional morality. The court has used the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of “liberty” and “equality” to reason that laws that penalize homosexuality (as in the Lawrence vs. Texas decision in 2003) or which deny special protected status to homosexuals (as in the Romer vs. Evans case in 1996) are violations of “liberty” and “equal protection.”
But this depends on reasoning that homosexual behavior and inclination are characteristics that mark out a particular class of people who constitutionally must be “equal” to all others. All behaviors and inclinations clearly are not equal, and to legally require that all behaviors be equal would make all crimes legal, since any crime might be taken as a basis of personal identity, and accorded “equal” or “protected” status. This writer’s recent summary of Prof. Michael Stokes Paulsen’s discussion of opposition to religious liberty noted that once a right is established in law, we must “endure the costs.”
The only way the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence supporting the sexual revolution makes sense is if it has a special power to discern moral truth, which it plainly does not have. That people are entitled to the sexual behavior they want is a moral intuition offered as the basis of the contraception decisions (Griswold vs. Connecticut and Eisenstadt vs. Baird) – and expanded to cover what we now call LBGT issues – it is not reasonably implied by constitutional guarantees of “liberty” or “equality.”
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