Colorado court outlaws religious freedom

Anyone who can still argue that homosexual marriage, and the coming fight over make homosexuals special snowflakes under the law, isn’t a direct attack on religious freedom really needs to increase their meds.

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I’ll let David Harsanyi of The Federalist set the stage:

Just in case you need a refresher: Back in 2012, a baker in the Denver suburb of Lakewood was asked by a gay couple to make them a wedding cake—two years before gay marriage was even legalized in Colorado. The owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Jack Phillips, declined to participate in Charlie Craig and David Mullins’ celebration, because such an event conflicted with his Christian faith.

Here are a few things Phillips didn’t do: He didn’t query consumers about their sexual preferences. He didn’t bar same-sex couples from purchasing a cake at a place of public accommodation. He didn’t ask consumers traveling in same-sex pairs to leave his shop. He didn’t hang a ‘No Gays Allowed’ sign in his window.

What he could never have known when he first opened his shop was that celebrating gay marriages would be a precondition for making a living. And when you consider that there are at least a few dozen other bakeries within a short drive from Masterpiece Cakeshop that could have accommodated the couple’s celebratory pastry needs, why would he?

Yet instead of exhibiting a basic level of tolerance (or dignity), two priggish bullies decided to call the authorities when Phillips refused to bake them a cake. And the cultural commissars at Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission soon ruled that he had discriminated against the couple.

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Yesterday, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled against Mr. Phillips. In an utterly Orwellian opinion in a case that hinges on whether the government can impede the ‘free exercise of religion’, the court ruled that Mr. Phillips could not use a religious freedom argument.

The court then rejects Phillips’s First Amendment compelled-speech argument because “designing and selling a wedding cake . . . does not convey a celebratory message about same-sex weddings likely to be understood by those who view it.” In addition, the court held that wedding guests would attribute the message of the cake to the customer, not to Masterpiece. In other words, a cake celebrating a wedding won’t be understood as celebratory. Right. Nor — despite the fact that every sentient person knows the cake is the baker’s work and not the couple’s — will anyone impute the couples’ views to the bakers. But if that’s the case — if the clear message of a cake isn’t imputed to the baker but instead the customer — then why is it okay to refuse “offensive” religious messages from religious customers?

In essence, the court toed the Obama administration’s “freedom of worship” line which says you can to to whatever church you want but you are forbidden to live life in society according to your faith. In fact, the court’s decision actually invalidates the Catechism and religious principles of the Catholic Church which holds that by cooperating with sin your are participating in sin. This is why driving a woman to an abortion clinic carries the same moral penalty as actually having the abortion. When Phillips was asked to make a wedding cake for a simulated marriage he was put in the position of endorsing that act and participating in that act.

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I dearly hope the conservative (self-styled) who supported homosexual marriage and the odds and sods who signed the infamous Republican amicus brief supporting homosexual marriage are now seeing the full impact of their folly, self-deception and duplicity.

An actual, black letter Constitutional right, a right that holds pride of place amongst the reasons for the founding of this nation, is being supplanted by the product of an Anthony Kennedy erotic dream.

Vladimir Lenin is given credit for saying, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Social liberals and libertarians have sold the left the rope they are using to strangle religious freedom.

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