A state appeals court in Colorado ruled Thursday that a baker could not cite religious beliefs in refusing to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples.
The decision is the latest in a series of similar rulings across the country that have been cheered by civil rights groups but attacked by conservative Christians as assaults on religious liberty.
Whether photographers, florists, bakers and other vendors who are Christians should have a right to refuse services for same-sex marriageshas emerged as a major cultural and legal battle, one that has intensified since the Supreme Court decision in June establishing same-sex marriageas a constitutional right.
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In the Colorado case, "the court squarely said that this is discrimination based on sexual orientation and it's not to be tolerated, even if it's motivated by faith," said Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the gay couple. "Religious liberty gives you the right to your beliefs but not the right to harm others."
A Clash of Cake and Faith
A Colorado bakery owner's refusal to make a cake for a same-sex wedding is headed to court.
By Mike Shum and Ashley Maas on December 15, 2014. Photo by Matthew Staver for The New York Times.Watch in Times Video »But lawyers for the cake shop said the appeals panel "got it wrong" and that they would probably appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court.
"Our client did not engage in sexual-orientation discrimination," said Jeremy Tedesco, a senior lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal group based in Arizona. He argued that an objection to same-sex marriage was not the same as discriminating against a gay person and noted that the baker, Jack Phillips, of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., also refused to make cakes celebrating Halloween because he associates the holiday with Satan.
"Cake decorating is his medium for creating art and they are compelling him to engage in artistic expression that violates his beliefs," Mr. Tedesco said, resulting in a trampling of his First Amendment rights to freedom of expression and religion.
But a unanimous three-judge panel of the Colorado Court of Appeals, in upholding the decision of the state Commission on Human Rights, said that same-sex marriage was so intrinsically related to the plaintiffs' sexual orientation that a refusal to serve them amounted to illegal discrimination.
The panel also rejected the argument that selling a cake to a gay couple was so great an infringement on Mr. Phillips's beliefs that it trumped the anti-discrimination law.
No reasonable observer, the decision said, "would interpret Masterpiece's providing a wedding cake for a same-sex couple as an endorsement of same-sex marriage, rather than a reflection of its desire to conduct business in accordance with Colorado's public accommodations law."
In July of 2012, a gay couple asked Masterpiece to create a wedding cake for a celebration of their marriage. Mr. Phillips told them that he could not design and bake a wedding cake for them because it would violate his Christian convictions, although he would be happy to sell them other baked goods.
The couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, filed a complaint under Colorado law, which bars discrimination in public accommodations based on sexual orientation. An administrative law judge and then the Colorado Civil Rights Commission both ruled that the cake shop had engaged in illegal discrimination.
Neither the law nor Thursday's ruling prevents Mr. Phillips' shop "from expressing its views on same-sex marriage — including its religious opposition to it — and the bakery remains free to dissociate itself from its customers' viewpoints," the appeals court stated.
In a case involving similar arguments over artistic expression, the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that a photographer who refused to photograph a same-sex wedding had violated an anti-discrimination law.
Last month, a state agency in Oregon ordered a Christian-owned bakery to pay $135,000 in damages to a lesbian couple for refusing to make them a wedding cake. That case is under appeal, as is another in the state of Washington, where a florist was fined $1,000 in March for refusing to provide flowers for a same-sex wedding.
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