The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the Oregon Court of Appeals’ ruling that permitted that state’s bureau of labor to punish yet another Christian bakery.
Citing its decision for Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado, the court said Oregon’s court must reconsider permitting Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries to fine a Beaver State bakery $135,000 because it refused to make a cake for a lesbian “wedding.”
So yet again, the high court delivered a blow against the sexual revolutionaries trying to punish Christians who believe that two members of the same sex cannot be married.
Lesbians Upset
Oregon’s war against normalcy began in 2013 when a pair of lesbians complained that Sweetcakes by Melissa, owned by Aaron and Melissa Klein, refused to bake a cake for the lesbians’ wedding.
The refusal, which included a message from the book of Leviticus condemning homosexuals, upset the lesbians. One apparently collapsed in tears on her bed. Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries, not surprisingly, ruled that the Kleins “discriminated” against the sapphic plaintiffs.
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Then came the penalty. A judge for the bureau slammed Sweetcakes with a $135,000 fine for refusing to participate in the lesbian nuptials, a ruling Sweetcakes appealed to Oregon’s Court of Appeals.
In 2017, again not surprisingly, that court ruled against Sweetcakes. The court said the labor bureau’s diktat merely “requires their compliance with a neutral law” and that the couple “made no showing that the state targeted them for enforcement because of their religious beliefs.”
Having paid the fine and shut down their business even before the court ruled, the Kleins appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court published a two-sentence order. “The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the Court of Appeals of Oregon for further consideration in light of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Comm’n,” the court partly wrote.
Masterpiece Attacked Again
The ruling in Masterpiece squarely placed the court in the breach against those who would force Christian businesses to approbate homosexual sodomy.
That case involved Jack Phillips, the owner, who also refused to bake a “wedding” cake for a couple of homosexuals in Colorado.
The state’s Civil Rights Commission, which joined the two homosexuals in trying to wreck Masterpiece, ruled that if Phillips made wedding cakes, he had to make them for homosexuals. Phillips refused, taking away 40 percent of his business.
Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy averred that the commission was hostile to Phillips’ religious beliefs and violated the First Amendment. And so the high court overruled the state’s anti-Christian bureaucrats and courts.
Kennedy wrote that Colorado’s attack on Phillips “showed elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection. As the record shows, some of the commissioners at the Commission’s formal, public hearings endorsed the view that religious beliefs cannot legitimately be carried into the public sphere or commercial domain, disparaged Phillips’ faith as despicable and characterized it as merely rhetorical, and compared his invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust.”
That’s right. The Colorado civil rights Gestapo compared Christians to Nazis.
Amazingly, Phillips is still under attack. Having already lost a previous case against the baker just two months ago, a man who pretends he is a woman has sued Phillips a second time in a local court. Once again, Phillips had refused to provide a cake that trespassed his religious beliefs.
The homosexuals and Colorado have been waging war against Phillips for seven years. The message they’re sending to Christians? You’ll do what you’re told, your beliefs regardless, or face professional and financial ruin.
Back in Oregon
The question is whether Oregon’s Court of Appeals will act wisely given the Masterpiece decision.
And that, in turn, depends on whether the court will defend a state agency that attacked a business owner for much the same reason that Colorado attacked Phillips: The owner refused to provide a service because providing that service would have violated his religious beliefs and required him to become an accessory to another’s sin by partaking in it.
If what is past is prologue, the Kleins will have to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court once again.
