The Supreme Court ruled on June 30 in favor of Christian bakers who said Oregon’s law requiring them to make cakes to celebrate same-sex weddings infringed on their constitutional rights.
The decision came hours after the nation’s highest court issued a landmark 6–3 ruling in favor of Christian website designer Lorie Smith of 303 Creative, who said a Colorado law that punished her for refusing to create websites for same-sex weddings violated her First Amendment rights.
“The First Amendment protects the rights of all Americans to speak freely and live according to their sincere religious beliefs,” said the bakers’ attorney, Trent McCotter of Boyden Gray and Associates in Washington.
“As the Supreme Court has recognized, carefully guarding these rights is all the more important when the beliefs expressed are controversial,” he said in a statement.
Left-wing activists have been targeting bakers for years for political purposes, asking Christian confectioners opposed to same-sex marriage to bake wedding cakes for gay marriage celebrations.
When the bakers refuse to make the cakes, these activists sue under anti-discrimination laws in hopes of securing favorable legal precedents.
In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Supreme Court sided with Jack Phillips, a Christian baker whom a gay couple had asked to create a custom cake to celebrate their union, finding that a state human rights commission had violated his First Amendment right to free exercise of religion.
The Kleins
Turning to the case at hand, in 2007, Aaron and Melissa Klein opened a family bakery, in Gresham, Oregon, called Sweet Cakes by Melissa, specializing in custom-designed cakes.
The Kleins made wedding cakes to celebrate marriages, which according to their faith are the sacred union of one man and one woman. They were willing to serve everyone who entered the shop but wouldn’t create any cakes with messages that conflicted with their faith, such as cakes with profanity, cakes celebrating divorce, or cakes advocating harm to others.
