GAY TRUTH

Did the Supreme Court punt or pass on religious freedom, or did it deliver a kick in the pants to lower courts? It’s tough to tell from the competing media reports, but the owners of the now-defunct Oregon bakery Sweetcakes by Melissa are off the hook for $135,000 in fines. The court vacated a lower-court ruling that upheld the fines against Melissa and Aaron Klein for refusing to work a same-sex wedding. The Supreme Court declined Monday to decide whether an Oregon baker can refuse on religious grounds to design a cake for a homosexual wedding – a question it carefully sidestepped last year. The case would have given the court’s conservative majority the chance to expand upon its narrow 2018 ruling in favor of a Colorado baker. That decision did not apply beyond the case of Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, who the justices said was discriminated against by state regulators. The new case involves Sweetcakes by Melissa, a custom cake business operated by Melissa a...

There’s a lot of discussion about Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision which pitted religious freedoms against LGBT rights. Was the ruling really that significant? Since it was so narrow in scope, should Christian conservatives really rejoice? Did the justices merely kick the can down the road? (For my own take, see here and here .) Scores of articles have already been written on this, which means that it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. The bottom line is that Jack Phillips won. His religious freedoms were upheld. There was a pushback against governmental hostility towards religion. All that is very good news. To put this in perspective, what if the Supreme Court had ruled against Phillips? What if the justices said that the state was within its rights to punish him for declining to design a same-sex “wedding” cake? What if there was no pushback against Colorado’s overt and explicit hostility towards Phillip’s Christian beliefs? What then? What would headlines hav...