Tim Gill is best known as the Denver-based mega-donor who bankrolled the successful national campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. In June, Gill sat down for an interview with Rolling Stone. He was asked about the future of the gay rights movement. If you had any doubt that Gill and other influential elements in the gay rights movement have come to embody the very traits they once claimed to oppose—intolerance, censoriousness, vengefulness—this is what he had to say: “ ‘We’re going into the hardest states in the country,’ he says. ‘We’re going to punish the wicked.’ ”
The quotation raised enough eyebrows that on July 21, author Andy Kroll, who conducted the interview, fired off a defensive response, claiming the remark was being blown out of proportion by “rightwing media.” Kroll added, “not once in my profile does Gill talk about ‘targeting’ Christians. Not once does Gill so much as hint at singling out Christians or adherents of any other religion.”
The idea that the network of advocacy groups bankrolled by Gill would oppose punishing Christians might surprise Barronelle Stutzman, a florist in Washington state. After developing a friendship with and doing business with Robert Ingersoll for nine years, he asked her to provide and arrange flowers for his same-sex wedding. Stutzman declined, citing her “relationship with Jesus Christ.”
Despite a constitutional promise of “absolute freedom of conscience in all matters of religious sentiment,” Washington state rejected Stutzman’s claim that arranging flowers is a creative, expressive profession and found her guilty of discrimination. The ACLU is currently suing the septuagenarian grandmother and will look to recover its legal fees, which could cause her to lose all her personal assets, including her home.
Then there’s the case of Jack Phillips, who owns a bakery in the Denver area. Phillips has always been guided in his business practices by his Christian beliefs: He refuses to bake cakes with alcohol in them, for instance, or to decorate cakes celebrating Halloween. Phillips’s specialties are elaborate cakes; on some he even paints original landscapes—so again, the issue of his free expression is front and center.
Phillips nonetheless was found guilty of violating the state’s anti-discrimination statutes after he declined in 2012 to create a cake celebrating a same-sex marriage. Instead he offered to sell the men anything else in his store. Diann Rice, a member of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission that found Phillips in violation of the state’s anti-discrimination law, brushed aside religious-liberty claims, saying that “freedom of religion . . . has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust.”
It should be abundantly clear that the elements of the gay rights movement wanting to punish “the wicked” stand in opposition to the First Amendment. A printer in Kentucky, Blaine Adamson, was prosecuted for declining to make T-shirts for a gay pride parade, never mind that the owner of a printing press clearly gets to decide what words he prints. Adamson won his case in state court, but it is still being appealed.
There’s also the question of whether the broader gay community supports this. Adamson has supportive gay employees and a lesbian print-shop owner has publicly ridden to his defense. Not even other gay people are safe from the crusade against free expression. In June, three lesbians were kicked out of a gay pride event in Chicago for waving rainbow flags with Stars of David on them, and the award-winning reporter for the local gay newspaper who chronicled their expulsion was removed from her reporting job after her publisher was pressured.
At this point it should be clear the religious right are not waging a sustained campaign to combat basic gay rights. The Obergefell decision is not destined to become another Roe v. Wade. There are precious few opportunities for détente in the culture wars, but this is one of them. There is no reason why tolerance shouldn’t extend to Christian business owners who are happy to serve gay people in every context except, as they see it, participating in a ceremony that offends their conscience.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Jack Phillips’s case in its upcoming session and is being petitioned to hear the case of Barronelle Stutzman. (There’s a chance the two cases may get rolled into one.) So the Justices, too, have an opportunity to reaffirm the protections of the First Amendment and to halt in their tracks activists who want to kill free speech in the name of expanding gay rights. Let’s hope they take it.
