Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 2018

Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Comm'n

584 U.S. 617 | 138 S. Ct. 1719 | 201 L. Ed. 2d 35 | 2018 U.S. LEXIS 3386

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Takeaway

In short, this case was a narrow Free Exercise ruling: Colorado could enforce its anti-discrimination law, but this Commission could not do so while disparaging and unevenly evaluating a business owner's sincere religious beliefs.

Background

Jack Phillips, a devout Christian and owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado, declined in 2012 to create a wedding cake for Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins, a same-sex couple planning a Massachusetts wedding and a Colorado reception. Phillips explained that his religious beliefs opposed same-sex marriage, although he offered to sell the couple other baked goods. At the time, Colorado did not recognize same-sex marriages performed in the State.

Craig and Mullins filed a charge under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA), which bars places of public accommodation from denying goods or services because of sexual orientation. The Colorado Civil Rights Division found probable cause, and an Administrative Law Judge held that Phillips had unlawfully discriminated. The ALJ rejected Phillips' arguments that CADA compelled speech and burdened his free exercise of religion. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission affirmed, ordered Phillips to stop refusing wedding-related goods to same-sex couples, required employee training, and imposed reporting requirements.

The Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed. It concluded that creating a wedding cake was not protected speech in this setting and that CADA was a neutral, generally applicable law under Employment Division v. Smith. The Colorado Supreme Court denied review, and the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Colorado Civil Rights Commission's adjudication of Phillips' case violated the Free Exercise Clause by failing to treat his religious objection with neutrality.

Holding

Yes. The Commission's treatment of Phillips' claim displayed impermissible hostility toward his religious beliefs, so its order violated the Free Exercise Clause and had to be set aside.

Reasoning

The Court began from two principles that must be reconciled. States may protect gay persons from discrimination in public accommodations and may generally require businesses open to the public to provide goods and services on equal terms. At the same time, religious and philosophical objections to same-sex marriage are protected beliefs, and a State must enforce its public-accommodations law without hostility toward religion.

The Court did not hold that religious objections generally permit businesses to deny services to protected customers. It emphasized that a broad rule allowing businesses to withhold goods and services for gay marriages could stigmatize gay persons and undermine civil-rights protections. But Phillips' narrower claim—that he was being required to use artistic skills to create an expressive wedding endorsement—was entitled to neutral and respectful consideration.

The Commission failed that neutrality requirement through commissioners' public remarks. One commissioner said that a business owner who chooses to do business in Colorado must compromise when the law conflicts with personal beliefs. Another called the use of religion to harm others one of the most “despicable pieces of rhetoric,” comparing religious defenses of discrimination to slavery and the Holocaust. These remarks disparaged Phillips' faith and suggested that the Commission judged the legitimacy of his religious justification rather than neutrally applying the law.

The Court also found evidence of unequal treatment in the State's handling of three complaints brought by William Jack. In those cases, other bakers refused to make cakes containing anti-gay-marriage images and religious text, and the Division found no CADA violation. The State accepted those bakers' objections to the requested messages and their willingness to sell other goods, yet discounted Phillips' willingness to sell other products to gay customers and reasoned that a cake's message would be attributed only to the customer. This inconsistency reinforced the conclusion that Phillips' religious objection received disfavored treatment.

Under Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, governmental neutrality is assessed in light of the decision's historical background, the sequence of events, and contemporaneous statements by decisionmakers. Here, the disparaging remarks and the disparate treatment of analogous conscience-based objections gave every appearance that the Commission evaluated Phillips' religious beliefs as illegitimate. Government may not make that judgment.

Issue #2

Whether the Court should decide Phillips' separate Free Speech claim that CADA unconstitutionally compelled him to create expressive wedding cakes for same-sex weddings.

Holding

No. The Court did not resolve the Free Speech claim or establish a general constitutional rule governing custom wedding cakes and same-sex weddings.

Reasoning

The record left uncertainty about the precise scope of Phillips' refusal, including whether he declined only to design a custom cake expressing a celebratory message or would refuse to sell any wedding cake to a same-sex couple. The Court explained that such factual distinctions can matter to both speech and free-exercise analysis.

Rather than determine whether custom cake design is protected expression or whether CADA could constitutionally be applied in a neutral proceeding, the Court resolved the case on the narrower ground that this particular Commission acted with impermissible religious hostility. Future disputes would require further consideration in their particular factual and legal contexts.

Concurrences

Justice Kagan

Reasoning

Justice Kagan, joined by Justice Breyer, agreed fully that the Commission acted with hostility toward Phillips' religious views. She wrote to clarify why the State's treatment of the William Jack cases was troubling without accepting the view that Phillips and the other bakers were ultimately entitled to identical results.

In her view, the proper neutral distinction was straightforward. The bakers approached by Jack refused to make cakes with messages they would not make for anyone, regardless of the customer's religion; they therefore did not deny him a product because of a protected trait. Phillips, by contrast, refused to sell a standard wedding cake to a same-sex couple while selling wedding cakes to opposite-sex couples, which CADA ordinarily prohibits.

Kagan maintained that Colorado could distinguish a baker who discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation from bakers who refuse a particular message for every customer. But the State agencies and the Colorado Court of Appeals did not rely on that neutral rationale consistently; instead, their reasoning about offensiveness and message attribution suggested bias against Phillips' religious objection.

Justice Gorsuch

Reasoning

Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Alito, agreed that the Commission violated the Free Exercise Clause and stressed that once government fails to act neutrally toward religion, it must satisfy strict scrutiny. He regarded the Commission's unequal treatment of Phillips and the bakers in the Jack cases as especially clear evidence of nonneutrality.

Gorsuch viewed the cases as legally alike. In both, a baker refused a requested cake because of a personal conviction, would have refused that same requested cake for any customer, and remained willing to sell other products to members of the protected class. In his view, the relevant product in Phillips' case was a cake celebrating a same-sex marriage, not merely a generic wedding cake.

The Commission used incompatible mental-state rules, according to Gorsuch. In the Jack cases, it distinguished an intent to reject an offensive message from the foreseeable effect of refusing a customer in a protected class. In Phillips' case, it effectively presumed discriminatory intent from the foreseeable effect of his refusal. Government cannot apply a more favorable rule to secular objections than to religious objections.

Gorsuch rejected efforts to distinguish the cases based on the presence of written words or by describing Phillips' cake at a higher level of generality. A wedding cake can convey a celebratory message without words, and civil authorities may not redefine a believer's religious commitments to eliminate their constitutional significance. Because Phillips established a completed First Amendment violation, Gorsuch concluded that he was entitled to the same favorable result the State gave the other bakers.

Justice Thomas

Reasoning

Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, agreed that the Commission's religiously hostile and discriminatory treatment violated the Free Exercise Clause. He wrote separately because he would also have addressed Phillips' Free Speech claim.

Thomas accepted the Colorado Court of Appeals' description of the facts: Phillips refused to design and create a custom wedding cake, rather than simply refusing to sell any pre-made cake. That conduct, Thomas concluded, was expressive. Phillips used artistic judgment to design cakes, and wedding cakes have a well-recognized communicative function of marking and celebrating a marriage.

Applying CADA to require Phillips to create a custom cake for a same-sex wedding would therefore alter the expressive content of his work and compel him to convey a message his faith forbade. Thomas rejected the state court's suggestion that observers would understand Phillips to be merely complying with law or that he could solve the problem with a disclaimer; those propositions would permit government to compel speech whenever it could attribute the compelled message to legal compliance.

Thomas reasoned that strict scrutiny, rather than the more deferential standard for incidental burdens on expressive conduct, should apply because Colorado punished Phillips for refusing cakes celebrating same-sex marriage. He did not decide strict scrutiny in the first instance, but rejected the asserted interest in preventing offense, stigma, or indignity as a sufficient basis to compel protected speech. The First Amendment protects even views society regards as offensive or mistaken.

Dissents

Justice Ginsburg

Reasoning

Justice Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sotomayor, agreed that neutral public-accommodations laws generally protect gay persons from denial of goods and services and that business owners ordinarily may not deny wedding-related services to same-sex couples because of religious objections. She dissented because, in her view, the record did not establish that the Commission's action was infected by unconstitutional hostility.

Ginsburg considered the William Jack cases materially different. Jack requested cakes that would literally display messages condemning gay persons or same-sex marriage, and the other bakers would have rejected those messages for every customer, regardless of religion. Craig and Mullins, by contrast, requested an ordinary wedding cake that Phillips would have sold to an opposite-sex couple; he refused solely because of the couple's sexual orientation.

The other bakers' willingness to sell different products to Christian customers showed that they did not deny Christians any product available to others. Phillips' willingness to sell cookies, brownies, or non-wedding cakes to gay customers did not cure his refusal to sell the particular product at issue—a wedding cake—on equal terms. Thus, Ginsburg concluded that Colorado could properly find discrimination in Phillips' case but not in the Jack cases without discriminating against religion.

Ginsburg also found the commissioners' remarks insufficient to invalidate the outcome. The Commission was only one layer in a process that included the Division's probable-cause determination, an ALJ's decision, Commission review, and de novo appellate review. Unlike Lukumi, she explained, the challenged decision was not the action of a single governmental body shown to have acted with religious animus. She would have affirmed the Colorado Court of Appeals.