California courts previously held Catharine Miller violated a state civil rights law by declining to sell a same-sex couple a wedding cake.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up the case of a Christian baker in California who was prosecuted for declining to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex marriage celebration.
The nation’s highest court turned away the petition without comment in an unsigned order in Miller v. Civil Rights Department on Dec. 8. No justices dissented.
The ruling came after Christian professionals who object on religious grounds to providing services related to same-sex marriage have won victories at the U.S. Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds in recent years.
In 2023, in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the court ruled Colorado couldn’t force a Christian website designer to create websites to celebrate same-sex weddings. In 2018, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court ruled Colorado couldn’t compel a Christian baker to make a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex union.
In the case at hand, the petitioner, Catharine Miller, is the sole owner of Cathy’s Creations Inc., which operates a small bakery in Bakersfield, California, called Tastries Bakery, where she designs and produces custom wedding cakes. Miller opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds.
After Miller started the bakery in 2013, she started to receive requests for custom projects that “were not in line with” her faith. Among those requests were “gory” cakes, “marijuana” cakes, “adult” cakes, and cookies depicting genitalia, as well as a cake announcing a divorce that a husband was planning to surprise his then-wife with. Miller declined the requests, according to the petition her attorneys filed.
In August 2017, two women showed up at the bakery seeking a wedding cake for their own upcoming wedding reception. They indicated they wanted two women to be depicted on the top of the cake. Miller told the women that she could not “be a part of a same-sex wedding because of [her] deeply held religious convictions, and [she] can’t hurt [her] Lord and Savior.” Miller offered to refer the women to a nearby custom wedding cake designer, but the women declined the referral, the petition said.
The women took to social media to complain about Miller’s policy and adverse media coverage of the situation followed. Miller shut down the bakery’s social media and temporarily closed the store. In the following months, Miller received hundreds of abusive messages and lost half of her employees and some corporate contracts because of harassment, the petition said.
After she chose not to make the cake, California’s Civil Rights Department took Miller and her bakery to court, claiming violations of the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which is the state’s public accommodation law.
The statute forbids business establishments from discriminating in their “accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services” based on “sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status.” California courts have also extended the law’s protections to families with minor children and the elderly.
Miller’s defense was that she was exercising her rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, as protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
Following a week-long trial, a state court ruled for Miller, finding her First Amendment rights were violated. The California Court of Appeal later reversed, finding that the white, multitiered cake Miller would not provide for the women “conveyed no particularized message about the nature of marriage.” That court held that Miller’s refusal to make cakes for same-sex weddings constituted discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The California Supreme Court affirmed without comment in May 2025, according to the petition.
The petition argued the U.S. Supreme Court should reverse because its free speech precedents hold that “compelled participation in a ceremony, particularly one with deeply religious significance such as a wedding ceremony, is forbidden by the First Amendment.”
The high court’s free exercise precedents also hold that laws interfering with the practice of religion may be struck down because they invite “the government to consider the particular reasons for a person’s conduct,” the petition said.
The Civil Rights Department urged the U.S. Supreme Court not to take up the case.
The lower courts “correctly rejected” Miller’s free speech claims, and her free exercise arguments are “premised on a misunderstanding of state law,” according to the agency’s brief.
The department hailed the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling.
“You cannot deny someone service by claiming a predesigned, multipurpose cake is protected speech,” department director Kevin Kish said in a statement. “Every Californian is entitled to full and equal services at businesses in our state.”
Miller told The Epoch Times she was disappointed by the ruling.
“For over a decade, I’ve welcomed everyone who comes into Tastries with the care and honesty my faith calls me to, and I’ll continue doing exactly that. This isn’t the result I prayed for, but I am sure God will use this for His glory,” she said.
One of Miller’s attorneys, Adèle Keim, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, praised her client for her “remarkable courage over the last eight years.”
“We’re disappointed the Court declined to hear Cathy’s case, and we are evaluating Cathy’s options for continuing to run Tastries in a way that reflects her faith,” Keim told The Epoch Times.
