Across the country, Christians are being deliberately targeted by leftist activists who would love nothing more than to see them punished for daring to believe in values different from the Left’s. And the Supreme Court is letting it happen.
Last week, the court declined to hear an appeal from a Christian florist who was sued for refusing to make a floral arrangement for a same-sex wedding. Like Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who won his case before the Supreme Court in 2018 but continues to face lawsuits, Barronelle Stutzman argued that being forced to create goods in celebration of a ceremony that violated her religious beliefs was unconstitutional. But the state of Washington handed her a $1,000 fine anyway, and the state Supreme Court upheld that decision.
The reason Stutzman’s case was so important is because it gave the Supreme Court another chance to resolve many of the questions it refused to answer when Phillips appeared before the bench. The court ruled in his favor 7-2 but in a very narrow way. The justices focused on the process by which Colorado tried to compel Phillips to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, arguing the state’s Civil Rights Commission exhibited “anti-religion bias” in the way it dealt with him. But the court avoided the core issue of Phillips’s case: Can the government force creative professionals to create custom art expressing messages that violate their religious beliefs?
In other words, the court’s ruling left an open question as to whether Colorado could have forced Phillips to bake a cake in celebration of a wedding that violated his religious beliefs if it had only hidden its hostility and applied its laws neutrally. And as a result, Phillips’s right to operate his business according to his religious beliefs is no better off than when he was first sued. He continues to face lawsuit after lawsuit from leftists eager to make an example out of him, and there’s a good chance he might end up at the Supreme Court again before all is said and done.
Stutzman’s case was a chance for the Supreme Court to rectify this wrong, to deal directly with the questions it avoided once before, and to ensure that religious people can exercise their rights freely without fear of being dragged to court. Unfortunately, it chose not to, and the country will be worse off for it.
