Amicus Blog

Justice Neil Gorsuch argues that it is impossible to make a principled legal distinction between (a) a baker’s refusal to make a cake that the customer will use to celebrate a same-sex marriage and (b) a baker’s refusal to make a cake designed with religious text or symbols expressing disapproval of same-sex marriage, when both sexual-orientation and religion are protected characteristics. On his view, neither refusal is discriminatory, because both cases are “about the kind of cakes, not the kind of customers.” Gorsuch’s claims that in both cases these refusals are objections to supporting specific messages and not refusals made because of the potential customers’ protected characteristics. Here I argue that a principled distinction can be made between the two cases. In the former, the baker is trying to control the use for which an item he ordinarily sells is used based on the users’ sexual-orientation. In the latter, the baker is refusing to make an item that she would refuse to make for anybody, regardless of the characteristics of the potential customer. I further argue that for this reason, among others, the former case ought to be ruled discriminatory while the latter case ought not.