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Jun 03, 2024

Court Makes It Clear: Government Submissions To Twitter Flagging Program Do Not Violate The 1st Amendment

Please provide a citation, because none of that is true.

As you wish. Per Wikipedia’s article on Masterpiece Cakeshopv. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (which has plenty of citations, should you need to check those out), emphasis mine:

Craig and Mullins visited Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, in July 2012 to order a wedding cake for their return celebration. Masterpiece’s owner Jack Phillips, who is a Christian, declined their cake request, informing the couple that he did not create wedding cakes for marriages of gay couples owing to his Christian religious beliefs, although the couple could purchase other baked goods in the store. Craig and Mullins promptly left Masterpiece without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cake. … While another bakery provided a cake to the couple, Craig and Mullins filed a complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission under the state’s public accommodations law, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits businesses open to the public from discriminating against their customers on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. … The case was decided in favor of the plaintiffs; the cake shop was ordered not only to provide cakes to same-sex marriages, but to “change its company policies, provide ‘comprehensive staff training’ regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps it has taken to come into compliance and whether it has turned away any prospective customers”. … Masterpiece appealed the decision … and refused to comply with the state’s orders, instead opting to remove themselves from the wedding cake business[.] … The state’s decision was upheld on the grounds that despite the nature of creating a custom cake, the act of making the cake was part of the expected conduct of Phillips’s business, and not an expression of free speech nor free exercise of religion. The court distinguished its decision … from another case, brought to the Commission by William Jack, in which three bakeries refused to create a cake for William Jack with the message “Homosexuality is a detestable sin. Leviticus 18:22”,: 21  citing that in the latter, the bakeries had made other cakes for Christian customers and declined that order based on the offensive message rather than the customers’ creed, whereas Masterpiece Cakeshop’s refusal to provide Craig and Mullins with a wedding cake “was because of its opposition to same sex marriage which…is tantamount to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation”.

(That other case was Azucar Bakery, by the by. It won its case because it sold a cake to a customer but refused to decorate the cake with speech it found objectionable. That refusal was considered reasonable because it was based not on the customer’s identity, but on the speech itself.)

The underlying ethos of those rulings is simple: If your business is open to (and serves a basic item to) the general public, you don’t get to decide who makes up “the general public”⁠—especially if non-discrimination law is involved. And notice that instead of complying with the law and selling wedding cakes to gay customers, Masterpiece intentionally pulled itself out of the business of selling wedding cakes. Also notice that at no point did the state of Colorado force Masterpiece to make a cake, custom or otherwise, for the gay couple that the bakery had initially discriminated against.

SCOTUS even specifically cited that fact, and that CO had compelled the speech they agreed with and not the speech they didn’t.

Except you are, once again, wronger than unholy hell. From the same Wiki article as before:

The [majority] opinion [in the SCOTUS ruling] stated that although a baker, in his capacity as the owner of a business serving the public, “might have his right to the free exercise of his religion limited by generally applicable laws”, nevertheless, a State decision in an adjudication “in which religious hostility on the part of the State itself” is a factor violates the “State’s obligation of religious neutrality” under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Kennedy’s opinion stated that the Commission’s review of Phillips’s case exhibited hostility towards his religious views. The Commission compared Phillips’s religious beliefs to defense of slavery or the Holocaust. Kennedy found such comparisons “inappropriate for a Commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law”. Kennedy’s opinion also cited the three exemptions the commission previously granted for the non-discrimination law arising from the William Jack complaints. The opinion also noted differences in handling previous exemptions as indicative of Commission hostility towards religious belief, rather than maintaining neutrality. Kennedy’s opinion noted that he may have been inclined to rule in favor of the Commission if they had remained religiously neutral in their evaluation. …

The Court avoided ruling broadly on the intersection of anti-discrimination laws and rights to free exercise. Instead the court addressed both sides. State actors like the Colorado Civil Rights Commission on the one hand must ensure neutral and respectful consideration of claims for religious exemptions from anti-discrimination laws which are made by people who exercise their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. However, this exemption won’t apply broadly in the future because future disputes like the one in Masterpiece “must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market”. The Supreme Court also specifically made it clear, on the other hand, that gay Americans are also entitled to strong defense rights. Justice Kennedy wrote: “[t]he First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths. Nevertheless, while those religious and philosophical objections are protected, it is a general rule that such objections do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law.”

Nothing in the majority ruling mentions that the state of Colorado ever tried to compel any kind of expression of speech from Masterpiece. If you can find something in the ruling that says otherwise, feel free to quote it.

your retelling of the Masterpiece case is counter-factual

Yours is slightly correct, but you’re making claims about what the state of Colorado tried to do (or succeeded in doing) to punish Masterpiece Cakeshop for violating the law. If you can’t even cite a single factual article or court ruling that explicitly says something to the effect of “the bakery was forced to make and/or decorate a cake for the customers that sued the bakery”, your assertions are bullshit and should be treated as such.

without discussing with Phillips any of the details of their wedding cakeanother bakery provided a cake to the couplethe act of making the cake was part of the expected conduct of Phillips’s business
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