Did the Supreme Court Succeed at Squaring the Circle on the First Amendment vs. the Queering of America?

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

On matters of great moral principle, the U.S. Supreme Court has a history of avoiding making big statements, unless it’s to help the powers of racial socialism, even when its decisions are on matters of constitutional and moral principle. The New York Sun sees no problem here.
 

Will Colorado Apologize?

Editorial of The New York Sun |
June 9, 2018

Does Colorado feel any contrition? That is the question in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Christian baker of wedding cakes. The court may have ducked whether a religious baker has a First Amendment right to refuse to craft a custom cake for a same sex wedding. It did not shrink, though, from the question of whether Colorado provided the hapless Christian a fair hearing.

[The real constitutional question involved whether a business has a First Amendment right to refuse anyone service, not whether the Colorado Civil Rights Commission gave Jack Phillips a fair hearing.]

The court concluded that Colorado failed. Colorado, the justices asserted, owed the baker, Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop, “an adjudication in which religious hostility on the part of the State itself would not be a factor.” Yet, the justices determined, “When the Colorado Civil Rights Commission considered this case, it did not do so with the religious neutrality that the Constitution requires.”

Had a private enterprise defaulted on a constitutional obligation as abjectly as the Colorado Civil Rights Commission defaulted on Masterpiece Cakeshop, heads would already have rolled. Yet Governor Hickenlooper reacted to the Supreme Court’s devastating judgment on his state’s civil rights enforcement with a mincing statement that displayed not a particle of contrition.

[“Mincing”? You mean, like a fag?]

“It’s against Colorado law to deny goods and services to any individual because of sexual orientation,” the governor warned, though no one, leastwise Mr. Phillips, said it wasn’t. The governor went on to note that “nothing” in the Supreme Court’s “narrow opinion” curbs Colorado’s law. Nor, he added, “prevents the state from protecting LGBTQ persons from discrimination.”
[Wait a minute. But Masterpiece Cakeshop did discriminate against homosexuals.]

Yet neither of those questions was before the Nine. What was before them was whether Colorado was going to protect the First Amendment rights of a fundamentalist Christian. The petition on which the Supreme Court acted carefully framed the question as whether Colorado’s application of its law against Mr. Phillips “violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment.”

[And what about freedom of association, for those who aren’t devout Christians? Oh, I just remembered. Freedom of association only applies to unconstitutionally “protected groups,” like homosexuals.]

What the court agreed to hear was not whether Mr. Phillips was a bigot but whether Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission was infected with bigotry. Governor Hickenlooper dodged that. On the one hand, he said “we” are “disappointed with the decision.” On the other hand, he claimed, “we take seriously the Court’s admonition that the state must apply its laws and regulations in a manner that is neutral toward religion.”

Then Mr. Hickenlooper allowed as how he nursed “no doubt that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission will meet that standard as they listen, respectfully, to all sides of the matters that come before it and issue decisions that uphold the protections afforded under Colorado law.” No mention of the fact that the Civil Rights Commission had just been found by the Supreme Court to have failed exactly that test.

[Well, Hickenlooper’s a lefty. What would you expect from him?]

The court quoted at length the insults commissioners uttered to “disparage” Mr. Phillips’ religion, adding that “the record shows no objection to these comments from other commissioners.” The justices noted that the state court “did not mention those comments, much less express concern with their content.” In the Supreme Court briefs, Colorado failed to disavow the commission’s bigotry.

The Left is chortling that a polite commission could yet rule against a future Jack Phillips. We, for one, doubt that a commission unbiased against religion would refuse to accommodate Mr. Phillips. An unbiased commission would have found a way to accommodate his religions scruples and those of others like him. That, in our opinion, is the logical, the constitutional, and the American way.

[“The Left is chortling that a polite commission could yet rule against a future Jack Phillips.” They’re right. A commission stacked with polite, pc Republicans would have also ruled against Phillips.]

That is what we do with conscientious objectors in war, celebrating soldiers like Desmond Doss. The Supreme Court has done that in respect of the Little Sisters of the Poor, who fear the birth control mandate.

Accommodating the most devout Americans in their religious principles, we believe, helps to embolden a society to protect secular Americans to pursue their own lives in peace.

[Then I guess we’ll have to grant the “most devout” Moslems a right to polygamy. And what about equality before the law?]

The good news is that even before Masterpiece Cakeshop was decided, the Colorado legislature was fermenting with discontent over the way Mr. Phillips was treated. Republicans in the state Assembly have been calling for changes in the Commission. In the wake of Monday’s ruling, the Denver Post reports, the GOP could try next year to “alter the commission.” Even in politics, it’s never too late to say you’re sorry.

[The bad news is that while all “civil rights” laws, along with the municipal, state, and federal bureaucracies that enforce them are unconstitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court and the New York Sun both averted their gaze from the truth.]