Under the laws in place in Colorado at the time. Those laws gave businesses some latitude to refuse to create specific messages they considered offensive. At the time gay marriage was also illegal in the state. Since then gay marriage is now legal and the anti-discrimination laws have changed.
No matter how they or you parse it, this ends the ability to claim someone is discriminating against you based on their refusal to provide a cake to help you celebrate your cause.
In this particular case, yes. There are other cases working their way through the system concerning businesses refusing to do work for gay marriages. This decision may or may not support upholding those.
Therefore it is not a narrowly based decision.
I guess our definition of "narrow" as applied in this situation differ.
Renting a suit to a person going to take part in a homosexual wedding is not something you can refuse. It doesn’t signify support for the wedding. The renter wouldn’t even have to say where they were going to use the suit. They just need a suit.
Specifically making a cake with a focused motif to celebrate a homosexual marriage does intimate that. “Congratulations on your marriage, Bob and Bill.” That is specific.
This owner said he would sell them merchandise, it’s just that he would not help them celebrate something he does not approve of.
I liken the refusal to rent a suit to the sale of normal non-event specific baked goods.
Now if they had tried to get someone to make a suit with a message on the back, focused on the celebration of a homosexual marriage, that would be different.
The SCOTUS just made it okay for people to refuse service if a focused message supporting something the service provider didn’t wish to be seen supporting.
That is not limited to cakes. Signs, personalized clothing, and other event or message specific items should now be okay to refuse to provide.
That lops off a whole category of things a service provider MUST provide.
If no person in the nation can be taken to task for these things any longer, do you really see this as a narrow decision? Seems pretty broad to me.
A lot of service providers will be protected by this decision.
Conservative SCOTUS is assuming Trump will pick more conservative justices, so, the next time it’ll be a decision on the right of designers to not be forced to write a statement they’re religiously against.