M any readers are aware of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case involving a Christian baker who was punished by the state of Colorado for refusing on religious grounds to bake and design a wedding cake for a same-gender coupling celebration. The litigation which Agudath Israel of America calls “one of the… most closely watched religious liberty cases in recent years” is now before the Supreme Court and last week the Agudah filed an amicus brief written by Washington attorney (and my mechutan) Jeff Zuckerman.
I wasn’t privy to the strategy meetings on the matter but it seems to me that the brief accomplishes something very important. In straightforward legal terms it seems difficult to see how the Court could come down on the side of Colorado. The baker is asserting his First Amendment right to the free exercise of his genuinely held religious belief that it would be sinful to abet this ceremony. End of story.
But that simple logical rendition leaves out a major subplot of the story — the alternative lifestyle movement’s steamrolling of American society on behalf of first the normalization and now the celebration of its cause. It has won and society — and sanity — has lost. End of story.
That may be why the “Question Presented” at the outset of the brief was framed this way: “Will our society honor the guarantees of the Free Exercise Clause when a religious practice is based upon a moral judgment that is anathema to the contemporary zeitgeist?”
