On Monday, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in a narrow 7-2 decision, that Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop was afforded the legal right to refuse service to a same-sex wedding in the state of Colorado. The majority opinion written by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy found that the lawsuit conducted by the Colorado Commission for Civil Rights demonstrated areligious bias and unethical management. In ruling against the commission, the Supreme Court, perhaps incidentally, came down in favor of granting latitude to business owners who turn down particular consumers on religious grounds.
This decision (and the narrow scope of the adjudication) on the part of the Supreme Court was as brilliant as it was fair. It served to protect and preserve religious/corporate freedoms and minority rights alike.
In ruling in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who refused to cater a same-sex wedding, the Supreme Court wisely acknowledged the right of a business owner to refuse to supply a good or service outside of his conviction or desire and underlined the authority of business owners to conduct their practices as they see fit. At no time should a private business be obligated under coercive duress to sanction or support an event or activity to which its owners hold moral opposition.
This is where it is vital to make the distinction between a same-sex WEDDING and a same-sex COUPLE; Jack Phillips did not refuse to serve a same-sex couple, he refused to cater a same-sex wedding. This discrepancy is extremely important. Should Jack Phillips have refused to serve an individual member of the LGBTQ+ community solely on the basis of his or her sexual orientation, we'd be discussing an entirely different case predicated on entirely different principles. Refusing to offer goods, products, or services to an individual simply because of his or her sexual orientation is both wrong and illegal, and it is not the same as refusing to offer goods, products, or services to endorse an institution that a business owner does not support.
To establish laws which require private business owners to cater to any/all customers is to legislate a particular brand of morality (not very much different from legislated morality which would illegalize same-sex marriage altogether). Imagine a system of law which compelled and mandated all businesses to serve all clients at any time without offering business owners (equal citizens under the law) the same rights and privileges extended to customers. If one walks into a t-shirt printing shop operated by Muslim business owners and insisted on ordering t-shirts which ridiculed and derided Islam/Allah, should he be legally obligated to this service? The answer is no. Allowing the central government (or even regional governments on the state/county level) to use their authority and enforcing power to compel private businesses to offer products or services that they do not wish to provide sets a dangerous precedent which should, in the context of history, serve to make us deeply uncomfortable.
In a morally progressive and tolerant (albeit imperfect) society, the market should be able to determine which businesses operate in a fundamentally bigoted or discriminatory manner and weed those businesses out. To quote Senator Rand Paul, "In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people who have abhorrent behavior, but if we’re civilized people, we [will] publicly criticize that, [we won't] belong to those groups, [and we won’t] associate with those people."
But of course, this principle cannot apply universally. Offering business owners the legal ability to turn away any customer on virtually any grounds may, as a premise, sound appealing to those who espouse a libertarian philosophy, but this sort of absolutist practice gave birth to the Jim Crow economics of the midcentury South. Allowing businesses to refuse service on any grounds whatsoever means that institutions which offer essential services (such as hospitals) could turn away men and women simply because they were black, gay, etc. Safeguards must be put in place to prevent this sort of discrimination and protect at-risk minority groups.
The government exists to preserve our interests under the law, and an important facet of this is preventive action against societal, systemic discrimination. As a result of this, minimal regulation on market freedoms will always be necessary. Libertarians are not anarchists as it pertains to free enterprise; they recognize that some legal stipulations must exist to protect our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Hiring hitmen and prostitutes, for example, is forbidden by federal law. In this sense, the government establishes which products and services can legally be sold (and to whom) and which cannot. Do these laws impede free trade? Perhaps technically, but this certainly must occur sometimes.
In Supreme Court decisions regarding the interpretation of Constitutional law, "narrow" and "close" are not synonyms. "Narrow" means that the ruling does not establish precedent and applies only to the specific incident in question. When media and news outlets call Monday's 7-2 Supreme Court ruling "narrow", they are correct.
The Supreme Court affirmed Jack Phillip's right to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, but it did not grant him the authority to turn away customers on the basis of their sexual orientation alone. Jack Phillips is entitled to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. He does NOT have the right to refuse to sell a same-sex couple cookies on their drive to work. The two things are not the same. They should not be compared.
Essentially, in this case, while same-sex couples still possess the right to civil union, business owners also maintain their right to operate their businesses freely. This is equality. The expansion of civil rights for particular groups at the expense of the property and private rights of other groups is not equality. Preserving the neutrality of the law means that, in this instance, a same-sex couple and a cake baker are allowed to do whatever they so please with their time and resources, so long as it does not actively harm other individuals. A cake baker cannot interfere with a same-sex marital ceremony, and a same-sex couple cannot strong-arm a baker into catering for them. For now, that is the best possible outcome.
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