A Daily Journal article on February 8, 2018, Judge rules for baker who refused to make same sex wedding cakes, discusses Kern County Superior Court Judge David Lampe’s ruling “that a Christian baker has the right to refuse to make cakes for same-sex weddings, declaring that her First Amendment freedoms of speech and religion outweigh the state’s interest in ensuring a freely accessible marketplace.”
According to the Daily Journal: “Sanford Jay Rosen of Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld LLP, who was not involved in the case, said Lampe’s argument would be intolerable if the refusal to design the cake had been directed at an interracial couple. ‘We’re talking about discrete minorities who have been left in the cold, who are just coming out of the shadows and enjoying what [Supreme Court] Justice [Anthony] Kennedy called ‘human dignity’,’ Rosen said.”
Not included in the article is an apt comparison Sandy made to the DJ reporter between the couple about to be married and black patrons of a barbeque restaurant who had been told they could not get table service, but could be served at the take-out window. The couple in this case had sat with an employee of this baker and selected their cake from lists of elements in the baker’s playbook. When they came back to the bake shop to place their order, they were confronted by the owner who told them she would not bake that cake for them, but she would refer them to a competitor who would. The U.S. Supreme Court decided that the restaurant’s argument could not trump Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and that the restaurant’s argument was frivolous.