Tastries Bakery Discriminated Against Lesbian Couple, Court Rules
A California appeals court ruled that a baker doesn't have a right to refuse to sell a generic cake to a lesbian couple.
A California appeals court has ruled in favor of a lesbian couple, finding that a baker discriminated against them when she refused to sell them a generic wedding cake.
The case deals with an exception to a loophole that many conservatives believe they had carved out, enabling them to openly discriminate against LGBTQ people in the provision of public goods or services.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who objected to creating a custom-made wedding cake for a gay couple’s wedding, finding that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had been unfairly prejudiced against the baker’s religious beliefs.
In 2023, the Supreme Court also ruled in favor of a Colorado web designer who demanded an exemption from the state’s law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, which would allow her to refuse to create custom-made websites for same-sex couples based on her religious beliefs opposing homosexuality.
In both cases, the court found that the custom-made nature of the services the baker and web designer were offering were specifically tailored to each couple and that forcing them to provide services to LGBTQ people or same-sex couples would violate their free speech rights.
But, in this case, involving Tastries Bakery in Bakersfield, California, the appeals court drew distinctions between custom-made goods and generic goods that are offered to all customers, regardless of background or personal characteristics.
The dispute dates back to August 2017, when Eileen and Mireya Rodriguez-Del Rio sought a cake for their wedding. The couple spoke with an employee of the bakery and selected a pre-designed plain, white, three-tiered cake that is sold for various celebrations, ranging from birthdays to baby showers, reports the nonprofit news agency CalMatters.
However, when the women subsequently returned to the bakery for a tasting, Catherine Miller, the bakery’s owner, refused to sell them the cake due to her religious objections to same-sex relationships.
Miller is a devout Christian who refuses to make cakes depicting marijuana use or sexual imagery. She argued in court that her bakery has a policy stating that “wedding cakes must not contradict God’s sacrament of marriage between a man and a woman.”
The Rodriguez-Del Rios filed a complaint with California’s Civil Rights Department, which sued Miller in 2018 on the couple’s behalf.
Miller’s lawyers, affiliated with the anti-LGBTQ Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, argued that her refusal to serve the couple should be protected because it was motivated by her religious beliefs rather than anti-LGBTQ animus.
A Kern County judge sided with the baker, finding that Miller did not violate the state’s Unruh Civil Rights Act because her policy applies to all customers and because she referred the couple to another bakery that had agreed to sell cakes to same-sex couples.
However, the state appealed the ruling, which a three-judge panel unanimously overturned earlier this month.
In their ruling, the judges found that Tastries’ policy is not neutral because its prohibitions would only apply to customers involved with same-sex weddings.
Additionally, because the cake did not contain any form of artistic expression and involved a plain cake with no writing or decorations, which the bakery routinely sells to customers for different occasions, the court found that Miller was not being “forced,” as she claimed, to express support for same-sex marriage.
“Drawing the contours of protected speech to include routinely produced, ordinary commercial products as the artistic self-expression of the designer is unworkably overbroad,” the judges wrote in their ruling.
Miller’s attorney told CalMatters that his client intends to appeal the most recent decision, which sets Becket Fund up to argue that people with objections to homosexuality and same-sex marriage should have a right to refuse to provide any goods or services to LGBTQ people, for any reason whatsoever.
If the principle that Becket seems to be arguing for were established and upheld by the courts, it would extend far beyond the realm of same-sex weddings, potentially enabling a store merchant to refuse to sell something as generic as a bottle of water to an LGBTQ person.
It is this very principle that many conservative organizations are seeking to achieve: the idea that LGBTQ people, by dint of their mere existence, should be shut out of the marketplace entirely if any person objects to their identity or relationship status, which could be justified by citing (even dishonestly) their purported religious or free speech rights.
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