A baker’s free speech – Toledo Blade

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When the Supreme Court declared that the Constitution protects gay marriage, did it thereby establish a view that all Americans must affirm?

The court itself answered that question nearly 75 years ago: No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

The court should stand by that pronouncement and reject the efforts of civil-rights bureaucrats to force creative professionals to celebrate gay weddings with their art.

When a bride and groom go to Jack Phillips bakery for a wedding cake, his lawyers told the court, he talks to them. He gets to know them and their relationship, and he celebrates them by baking a cake.

Mr. Phillips also turns down some jobs he does not want to take. He does not make cakes for Halloween, because theyre contrary to his religious values. And for the same reason, he says, he does not make cakes for same-sex weddings.

So when Charlie Craig and David Mullins asked him to make their wedding cake, he refused and, his lawyers say, offered to make them a cake for some other occasion. His faith teaches him to serve and love everyone, wrote the lawyers, and he does.

The couple went to another bakery and to the Colorado civil-rights bureaucracy, which ordered Mr. Phillips to start making cakes for marriages he does not believe in or stop making wedding cakes altogether. It even ordered him to re-educate his staff.

Mr. Phillips fought back, all the way to the Supreme Court, which accepted the case.

The Free Speech Clause prohibits the government from forcing people to affirm a message officials choose for them. The Supreme Court has ruled that schoolchildren may not be forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and drivers may not be forced to display license plates that say Live Free or Die. The pledge and that motto may be laudable messages, but Americans are free to decide they do not agree. Similarly here: The government has no right to force Mr. Phillips to agree with the Supreme Court, to think the right thoughts, or to bake a cake for someone he does not wish to bake it for.

Mr. Phillips may be wrong about civil marriage contracts. But the First Amendment protects the right to be wrong.

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A baker's free speech - Toledo Blade