Much will be said about the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday exonerating Jack Phillips, a Denver-based Christian baker who refused to make a special cake for a gay couple due to his closely-held religious convictions.
The Marxist Left will attempt to portray SCOTUS’ decision as an attack on gays and lesbians, while elected Democrats have already begun to declare that all civil rights for same-sex couples are dead and gone.
Leftist hysteria is nothing new, of course, but the reality is the sky isn’t falling and the justices — seven of the nine, anyway — delivered a huge victory for the Constitution by revitalizing a right that was in danger of being litigated away.
At issue was a Colorado law that bars discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The Constitution already bars that, mind you; the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause bars any discrimination, for any reason. More on this in a moment.
But the manner in which the state applied its law — or rather, the manner in which the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which was established by the law, applied the rules — was in question before the high court, primarily because its application was arbitrary and capricious.
According to the ruling, which was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the “commission’s treatment of Phillips’ case violated the State’s duty under the First Amendment not to base laws or regulations on hostility to a religion or religious viewpoint.”
“In other words,” noted Kit Daniels at Infowars, “the commission wasn’t ensuring equality under the law but was instead showing preference for one group over another.” (Related: GAY MAFIA handed huge defeat in 7-2 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving a Christian baker)
In December, when the high court heard oral arguments on the case, Kennedy appeared to be offended by the commission’s complete dismissal of Phillips’ religious-based objections to creating a special-order cake for a gay wedding.
Tolerance goes both ways
As The National Sentinel reported:
During testimony, the justices seemed to struggle with Phillips’ claims that he has a speech issue regarding his cakes. However, Justice Anthony Kennedy and the court’s conservative justices were concerned about government hostility towards religious beliefs, which was an indication that the case could go Phillips’ way.
In commenting on the case, Kennedy noted that “tolerance is most meaningful when it is mutual,” suggesting that the state civil rights commission was not as tolerant of Phillips’ religious views as it was the perception of a rights violation by Craig and Mullins.
Kennedy asked Yarger to disavow statements made by commissioners during the case which suggest hostility to orthodox religion. The commissioner said that in the past religion has been used to justify slavery and the Holocaust.
“[R]eligion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust,” the unnamed commissioner said. “We can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use.”
Well, that may be, but you wouldn’t know that unless a person admitted as much. And since there is no evidence to suggest that the Colorado commissioners are mind readers, their decision to side with a gay couple over the very clearly outlined First Amendment religious protections seemed to the majority of justices to be punitive and even intolerant.
The commission’s treatment of Phillips “showed elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection,” Kennedy’s opinion stated.
And this, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with ‘hate speech’ and ‘discrimination’ statutes: They often require officials to reach decisions regarding certain behaviors and acts that are both sincere and patently constitutional, but which nonetheless offend the sensibilities of the decision-makers. In these circumstances, the accused is guilty and must prove himself or herself innocent. That’s completely opposite to how our system of justice is supposed to work.
SCOTUS made a good decision on Monday, despite what Democrats say.
Read more at LeftCult.com.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
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