Yes, this again.
Work’s a little slow today so I went back and read some more of the amicus briefs in the Cake Jesus case (i.e., Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission). Today I want to focus on the one submitted by William Jack, a self-identified “Christian educator” who, right around the time of Cake Jesus’ hearing before the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, went to three different bakeries in Colorado and asked them to make Bible-shaped cakes with derogatory verses about homosexuality (e.g., “a detestable sin”) on them. He did this knowing that the bakeries would refuse, so he could then file a complaint with the Commission under the same law, claim that he was discriminated against because of his “religious beliefs” and, knowing that claim would be rejected, “prove” to himself and to Cake Jesus’ supporters that “Christians” are “under attack” for their “beliefs” and that all of this is totally unfair, because they can discriminate and we can’t.
The Respondents and their amici all uniformly dispense with these arguments, as did the Commission and the Colorado Court of Appeals, pointing out inter alia the critical distinction between a refusal of service based on the product’s content and one based on the customer’s identity, along with their fundamental misunderstanding of how public-accommodations laws actually work. What is fascinating to me about Mr. Jack’s brief is not only how childishly self-pitying it is, but how far Mr. Jack appears to be willing to go to equate Christianity with, and indeed define it as, hatred, revulsion and animus toward gay people and gay marriage and the desire to express that animus in any available forum.
This happy horseshit right at the beginning sets the tone for the rest of the brief:
The Colorado Civil Rights Commission has demonstrated a willingness to allow bakers to decline to make a custom cake when the message of the cake is objectionable or offensive to the baker, but only if the rejected message is religious or critical of same-sex marriage. A baker must create a cake when the message endorses same-sex marriage.
As far as I know, both Mr. Jack and the writer of this brief, one Michael Lee Francisco, are over the age of 18. But you wouldn’t know it from reading this.
Mr. Jack (via Mr. Francisco) argues (as Cake Jesus does in his brief, discussed in this diary) that the purportedly inconsistent results of his discrimination complaints versus that of the respondents in the instant case, as determined by the Commission, “expressed hostility towards Jack’s traditional religious views,” constituted “disfavored treatment of a religious customer” and “diminished the dignity of Jack’s … views about same-sex marriage. … [H]e was demeaned for his Christian creed[.]” The brief goes on, at the top of the Argument section, to state that Jack “was subject to unequal treatment and denial of service based on his religious creed: Christianity.” (emphasis added).
Again, there’s no need to go back over the difference between a refusal of service based on the content of the product request and a refusal of service based on the identity of the customer, but what Jack is doing here in confusing the two is actually conflating the two, and not in a helpful or flattering way. He’s doing that in part because he doesn’t understand how anti-discrimination laws work, or the difference between one’s identity and one’s “beliefs,” but that’s beside the point. He’s taking the well-known aphorism that “a tax on wearing yarmulkes is a tax on Jews,” which negates Cake Jesus’ argument that it’s the “conduct” or the “event” and not the customers’ identity as gay that was the basis of his refusal, and turning it on its head, without realizing what he’s implying.
Consider the logic:
- A tax on wearing yarmulkes is a tax on Jews.
- A tax on same-sex weddings is a tax on gay people.
- Therefore, a tax on expressing anti-gay sentiment is a tax on Christians.
A tax on wearing yarmulkes is a tax on Jews, because only (or practically only) Jews wear yarmulkes, and it’s an inextricable part of their identity as Jews. A tax on same-sex weddings is a tax on gay people, because only (or practically only) gay people enter into same-sex marriages, and it’s an inextricable part of their identity as LGBT. Therefore, a tax on expressing anti-gay sentiment is a tax on Christians, because only (or practically only) Christians harbor anti-gay sentiment, and it’s an inextricable part of their identity as Christians.
Why would Mr. Jack, or anyone else, want to argue that? How is this helpful to the cause of “religious liberty,” let alone “Christianity,” let alone actual Christians, to proclaim to the world that a unique, inherent and critical part of their religious identity is animus toward others, let alone a select category of others?
This goes on throughout the brief; Christian identity = anti-gay animus, along with more churlish whining about how unfair it is that the Commission let the other bakers refuse to “express” anti-gay animus but would not let Cake Jesus refuse to “express” nice, pleasant things about the gays, because both sets of bakers deemed the requested items “offensive.” Look here:
Colorado allowed all three bakeries that denied service to Jack to be free from legal compulsion because the bakers found the religious message of a cake offensive, regardless of the customer’s status as a member of a protected class. By way of contrast, it forbade the Masterpiece Cakeshop bakery to decline to create a custom cake based on sincerely held religious objections and compelled it to celebrate a same-sex marriage looking to the protected class of the customer. The only consistency in the Commission’s action is its targeted rejection of religious beliefs against same-sex marriage.
If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t believe that an actual lawyer, who actually went to law school and passed a bar exam, let alone matured beyond puberty, wrote this. More to the point, the brief is again equating “beliefs against same-sex marriage” with Jack’s — and every other Christian’s — identity as a Christian. Clearly Mr. Jack and his attorney don’t understand the difference between religious beliefs and religious identity, let alone that anti-discrimination laws protect the latter, not the former. That failure of comprehension, inter alia, is what leads them down this awful path.
It goes on:
In essence, the Commission permitted three bakeries to discriminate against Jack because the bakers considered his requested Bible verses to be “derogatory,” “hateful,” “shameful,” “discriminatory,” and “offensive.”
Then, thinking for some reason that it would be helpful, the brief quotes Mr. Jack himself, speaking to the Commission in one of his cases:
I am the one who was demeaned as a Christian for my creed. I was the one made to feel like a second-class citizen due to [the baker’s] prejudicial action against my creed. I was the one discriminated against for holding to what the Bible teaches, that certain actions such as homosexuality are considered unacceptable by a Holy God...
In case you haven’t thrown up yet:
The bakers’ refusal to provide service on account of religious beliefs was “demeaning to [Jack’s] belief in the veracity of the Bible. The Christian faith was denigrated...” … [T]he dignity of Jack’s sincerely held religious views on marriage were belittled and insulted by Colorado’s decision establishing that religious views deemed to be offensive are not worthy of protection as compared to other religious beliefs.
(emphasis added). Again, he fails to distinguish religious “beliefs” and “views” from religious identity, and does so (at least in my view) to his own detriment and that of his “creed.” And, lest we forget that expressing anti-gay sentiment is a critical, integral, and universal part of Christian identity:
Moreover, the state has denigrated the sincerely held religious beliefs of many others, not just Jack, by compelling a religious baker to produce a cake for a same-sex wedding celebration … while dismissing multiple cases of bakeries refusing to serve a Christian who desired to express a religious view critical of same-sex marriage. … The undeniable message to all religious citizens who hold traditional views similar to those of Masterpiece Cakeshop or Jack is that your views are odious and unworthy of respect in civil society.
(emphasis added).
If I were a Christian, I’m not sure I’d want either Mr. Jack or Mr. Francisco speaking for me. It’s not so much that they’re implying that all Christians hate gay people, even though they are doing that. What they’ve done here is gone one step further, and made anti-gay animus and the expression thereof as much a part of Christian identity as the wearing of yarmulkes is to Jewish identity, or of turbans to the Sikh identity. They’re telling us that if you meet some random person who really hates gay people and says so, then you can, and indeed should, safely assume that (s)he is a Christian — and should treat him/her accordingly.