The Court really botched this. It should have ruled that persons cannot be forced to PARTICIPATE IN a gay marriage. Period.
Selling a cake to gays is much different from creating one for them. Selling a roast beef is much different than attending the reception and carving it.
Very easy standard to establish and protects the rights of all persons.
Clearly they did not want to issue a landmark ruling on this subject. So they decided on some narrow procedures involved.
I’m no court expert by any means, but, I understand the supreme Court members do some deliberations on cases, to get a sense of where people stand. If that happened here, then they likely found they didn’t have the votes to issue a sweeping ruling. But they had the votes to issue a narrowed ruling on procedural issues.
Indeed. This should have never made it this far. At the time of the refusal (2012) to create a special work (typically over $500) for the specific purpose of celebrating what the Bible nowhere sanctions but only condemns, the CO state constitution itself invalidated same-sex marriage and defined marriage as btwn male and female ( by amendment it specified marriage as being btwn opposite genders, thus agreeing with the Lord Jesus - Matthew 19:4-6) . Therefore the baker acted in accordance with both the Law of God and the highest law of the state, but who was prosecuted by a political commission.
And the Colorado Civil Rights Commission not only fined Jack, but ordered that if he made custom wedding cakes for heterosexual couples, he also had to do it for same-sex couples. Then the Commission—behaving like some communist dictatorship might—ordered Jack and his employees to go through a “re-education” program and provide quarterly compliance reports. -http://www.breakpoint.org/2017/11/breakpoint-get-facts-jack-phillips/
And a wedding cakes have traditionally been used to convey a message. A dress maker refusing to sell a wedding dress to a man for his homosexual wedding when even the state did not recognize such as a legal marriage would also be justified. Another somewhat proper analogy would be a black couple trying to contract with a Jewish baker to create a cake celebrating the anniversary of Luis Farrakan's Nation of Islam, and the baker refusing due to this being a perversion of the True God. Resulting in the baker being charged with discrimination against a minority based on race
And as regards complicity, see Accomplice Mens Rea and Actus Reus
In order to obtain a conviction of a defendant for being a principal or an accessory before the fact, the prosecution must prove that the defendant committed an act that either encouraged or actually helped the criminal, that he had the requisite intent of encouraging or helping the criminal, and that the criminal who was encouraged or assisted by the defendant actually committed the crime..
And this just in: Baker who refused to make cake for gay wedding: 'I don't discriminate '
6/5/2018, 9:59:19 AM · by SeekAndFind · 80 replies NBC News ^ | 06/05/2018 | Adam Edelman Jack Phillips maintains he would 'serve everybody that comes in my shop,' but that he wouldn't 'create cakes for every message.' The baker at the center of a Supreme Court ruling that he cannot be forced to make a cake for a same-sex wedding told “Today” on Tuesday that he doesn’t “discriminate” against anybody and that he simply doesn't want to bake cakes “for every message” — saying that he would also refuse to create a dessert that insulted the LGBTQ community. Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cake in Denver, had argued that his cakes are works of art