Masterpiece Cakeshop and the narrow ruling everyone misread
The Supreme Court ruled for a baker who refused a same-sex couple, but the 7-2 decision turned on one commission's hostility, not a license to discriminate.
In 2012, Charlie Craig and David Mullins walked into Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, to order a cake for their wedding reception. Owner Jack Phillips refused, citing his Christian beliefs about marriage. The couple filed a complaint under Colorado's public accommodations law, which bars businesses from discriminating based on sexual orientation.
The case reached the Supreme Court and was decided on June 4, 2018. The vote was 7-2 in Phillips's favor. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion. Only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
A 7-2 win for a baker who turned away a gay couple reads like a sweeping result. It was nothing of the kind, and the reason matters.
Kennedy did not hold that businesses have a free-speech or religious right to refuse service to same-sex couples. He held that this particular plaintiff did not get a fair hearing. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which had ruled against Phillips, showed hostility toward his religious beliefs during its proceedings.
The opinion pointed to specific conduct. One commissioner described faith as something used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, citing slavery and the Holocaust, and called Phillips's invocation of religion despicable rhetoric. Kennedy wrote that the state must apply its laws neutrally toward religion, and that this commission had not.
Because the commission's process was tainted, the Court reversed its order against Phillips. The Court did not decide whether the First Amendment lets a business owner refuse to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Kennedy explicitly left that larger question open.
The distinction is easy to lose, and easy to weaponize. Opponents of LGBTQ equality treated Masterpiece as a green light. It was nothing of the sort. The ruling was tied to the conduct of one state body in one proceeding.
Kennedy underscored the limits. He wrote that gay people and gay couples cannot be treated as social outcasts or inferior in dignity, and that Colorado generally can protect them from discrimination in acquiring goods and services.
The question the Court ducked returned in 2023, when it decided 303 Creative v. Elenis, ruling 6-3 that Colorado could not compel a web designer to create custom wedding websites for same-sex couples. That decision reached the free-speech merits Masterpiece had left untouched.
Masterpiece itself remains what it always was: a procedural ruling about how a state agency treated one man's beliefs. The headline number, 7-2, told the public almost nothing about what the Court actually decided.