Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission

by Audrey Erickson

The wedding planning started the way it always does: with a cake. Okay, it may or may not have started with a cake; there’s the rings, and the garb, and the guests, and when Charlie Craig and David Mullins approached Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, in 2012 for a cake for their big day, Phillips didn’t exactly ask where they were in their planning process. In fact, Phillips refused to bake or decorate a cake for the happy couple, stating that his religious beliefs did not support samesex unions. What followed was a multi-year, highly publicized legal battle that culminated in the 2017 Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission The press from this case (herein referred to as Masterpiece) caught the attention of playwright and television writer Bekah Brunstetter, who would later draw from the details of Masterpiece to create her complicated, human drama, The Cake. While Brunstetter’s play finds levity and humor within a challenging topic, the case itself is a huge event in LGBTQIA+ history, and its legal implications are still being seen and experienced today.

When Craig and Mullins planned their Colorado nuptials, the couple had already been legally married in Massachusetts earlier that year (at the time, same-sex marriages weren’t legal in Colorado), and they wanted an opportunity to celebrate with their family and friends in Colorado. When they were turned away from Masterpiece Cakeshop in July of 2012, they saw the injustice of the situation and turned to the Colorado Civil Rights Division to file a discrimination complaint. The Division found that Phillips violated the Colorado AntiDiscrimination Act, which states that “it is… unlawful for a person, directly or indirectly, to refuse [goods and services to]…an individual or a group, because of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry…[at] a place of public accommodation.”

By September 2012, the Division had referred Craig and Mullins’s case to Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission, and preparation for a formal hearing began. The Commission, in their examination, found that, by refusing to make a cake for a same-sex couple, “Phillips violated Colorado’s public accommodations law that prohibits business establishments from discriminating"; the Court of Appeals agreed, and when the Colorado Supreme Court did not take the case, it went to the Supreme Court of the United States.

While refusing to make a cake for a gay couple may seem like a straightforward example of discrimination, the legality of the Masterpiece Cakeshop incident is a little more complicated. According to the Anti-Discrimination Act, businesses are not allowed to discriminate against protected classes and must give all paying customers the same access to the goods or services of that business; at the same time, the law protects individuals’ free will and religious beliefs. So even though Masterpiece Cakeshop was legally obligated to serve Craig and Mullins, Phillips as a private citizen has the right to act according to his religious beliefs. Phillips had been willing to sell the two men an already-made cake from their shop, but wouldn’t use his designing or decorating skills to personalize something for their ceremony; did this detail mean that Masterpiece Cakeshop was fulfilling their legal requirement? Furthermore, Phillips’s legal team argued that the cakeshop owner’s right to exercise free will was being violated, and that the Commission was exhibiting hostility toward Phillips’s religion in their argument. This legal strategy sidestepped the central question of Masterpiece –”Would it violate free exercise of religion or freedom of speech under the First Amendment to force Masterpiece Cakeshop to design and bake a cake for a same-sex wedding?”–and instead focused on criticizing the way in which Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission made their arguments.

It’s also worth noting that Masterpiece’s progression to the Supreme Court changed the stakes of Craig and Mullins’s legal battle with Masterpiece. In court, the outcome of a case decided by common law becomes a precedent for future cases involving similar legal issues or disputes; in other words, the decision can be used by lawyers in the future to make their arguments. When a case goes to a Supreme Court, whether a state’s Supreme Court or SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States), it means that it is complicated enough that it must go to the highest court to be evaluated. Legal cases like this one that are tied up in topical social issues become even more publicized and caught up in political agendas when they ascend to this level of court. Additionally, because SCOTUS is the highest court in the US legal system, “its decisions are binding precedent not only for the lower federal courts but also for state courts.”

With all the media, the anticipation, and the public’s divisive perspectives on a hot-button issue, it was a devastating loss for Craig and Mullins, as well as LGBTQIA+ activists, when they lost in the Supreme Court on Monday, June 4, 2018. In a decision that remains debated today, seven of the court’s nine judges opted to reverse the original ruling and decide in Phillips’s favor, with only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor disagreeing with the ruling.

The Supreme Court cited the Commission's hostility to Phillips’s religion as enough reason to reverse the decision, picking out a couple of specific quotes that the majority justices found to be evidence. Both quotes–one stating that Phillips couldn’t use his personal beliefs to inform how he runs his business, and the other speaking more broadly to the use of religion as a rhetoric to commit wrongdoing–have been closely examined by legal experts in the years since the 2018 decision, leaving many dubious that these statements show evidence of mistreating the case. The Court also justified that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had historically ruled in favor of “bakers who refused to make cakes with specific messages–” though many were quick to point out that those cases had not violated Colorado’s discrimination law.

The Supreme Court’s decision was viewed by many weak and politically motivated, but it did not provide full permission for LGBTQIA+ people to be discriminated against, as SCOTUS “did not rule on the broader constitutional questions of freedom of religion and antidiscrimination,” and rather ruled on the Commission’s practices. While this may seem like a small detail, it means that Masterpiece cannot be used as a precedent for people making the same argument as Phillips. In fact, the Supreme Court heard another case from Colorado in December of 2022, from web designer Lorie Smith, who preemptively sued Colorado with the belief that “the state public accommodations mandate violates her right of free speech.” While the case is yet to be settled (a decision is expected sometime this summer), it is a new opportunity for the central issue of Masterpiece to be answered and acknowledged in a way that was sidestepped in 2018. A highly anticipated decision, LGBTQIA+ activists hope that the decision will go their way, thanks to a changing political climate and Biden’s appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.

Are you interested in ways you can learn more about LGBTQIA+ law and policy, and how you can use your voice to get involved? Head over to our interview with Gia Drew, Director of EqualityMaine on page 12!