Hobby Lobby's Impact On Baker In Lakewood, CO

Just Married...But No Wedding Cake?

Corporate freedom or corporate responsibility and the shades of grey between.

This is the question at hand when dealing with the religious freedom that spawned this nation. Freedom that we hold near and dear in our home has spawned religious freedom laws, a personhood freedom of sorts that some believe should extend to corporations.  The most famous example of such freedom is Hobby Lobby, who finds working with people that don't want babies but might have sex problematic.  The Supreme Court determined that Hobby Lobby, being a "Closely Held" corporation, does have the right to at least avoid ObamaCare's mandate that companies support family management by paying for things that limit procreation during intercourse.  The fact that pregnant women are also regularly discriminated against in so many work environments forces a reluctance towards child bearing in the first place, but that's another blog for another day.

Companies who thought to follow suit with Hobby Lobby probably were smart to wait and see what the backlash would be first.  For the most part, the original "Closely Held" company has weathered the storm from their decision against providing birth control access for their employees. Hobby Lobby is not a publicly traded company so stockholders could not weigh in on their "Closely Held" convictions that found their way to the Supreme Court.   The Court's decision and  "Closely Held" description could be considering another shade of grey soon as appeals courts in Colorado recently ruled against a Lakewood baker who refused to make a gay cake. The baker intends to press his argument against gay cakes all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court and beyond if he can.

If you walk outside and listen very closely, there is this resounding echoing sound of "I told you so" reverberating across hills and plains of America. The lead voice in that echo might be Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Ginsburg anticipated this slippery slope when her comrades on the bench voted against her  and in favor of Hobby Lobby during the ObamaCare mandate ruling. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ginsburg wrote: 

"Although the court (lead opinion) attempts to cabin its language to closely held corporations, its logic extends to corporations of any size, public or private," she states. "(There's) little doubt that RFRA claims will proliferate, for the court's expansive notion of corporate personhood — combined with its other errors in construing RFRA — invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith." 

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20150222/NEWS/302229997/hobby-lobby-ruling-left-wiggle-room-over-definition-of-closely-held

As I listened to a local news interview this morning of that Lakewood, Colorado baker who is trying to test the limits of Colorado's law against businesses that attempt to establish social category bans such as "No Gay Cakes", he suddenly appeared introspective when he claimed that the court was wrong to violate his right to freedom of religion.  I don't want to assume that he isn't particularly religious if he claims he is, but he immediately refocused his gaze back on the interviewer after making his freedom of religion comment, and then he expanded his argument to "freedom of speech". While following this case, many of the baker's public statements have been about artistic expression versus religious freedom. My assumption is that this baker from Masterpiece Cake Shop can't build a masterpiece under the oppression of gay love, though I imagine every freedom of speech baker has unknowingly done a masterful gay cake or two in the past, discreetly purchased by friends so as not to create gay cake discomfort for the baker.

The truth is that gay people have long since learned how to fake straight to get into the military when draft requirements demanded it during Vietnam, or fake straight to fit in the locker room when homophobia demands it still.  Discreetly buying cakes for weddings without offending bakers who feel their cake might solidify the union and bring damnation to a baker who wants no part of it is nothing new either for gays. Homophobia was and is more life altering to the homo than the phobic. When finally it appeared that the laws of America have found homoempathy, a few gay people dared to venture out and get married, and double dared to do it with a professional wedding cake as part of the celebration. Laws against bigotry exist because bigotry has existed for so much longer and in so many various forms. In other words, the challenge of dealing with gay love isn't new for gay's.  It's new for US.

While cake is a much anticipated part of many important celebrations, some cakes are awful and only serve the function of fulfilling a sweet tooth or smashing on a face when it comes to weddings. They are much more symbolic and traditional than artistic necessities with spiritual undercurrents. As our initial homophobic questions around gay marriage arose, it was only a hypothetical example to ask, "what if a baker doesn't want to make a gay cake?". Why some bakers are actually jumping on that hypothetical argument and leading the charge against gay marriage is peculiar. Is business that plentiful?   Many of these patriots of principle might in fact be biting off their nose to spite their face like that pizza place down south that wanted to declare themselves against serving their pizza at a gay wedding (who does that anyway), and is no longer serving their pizza to anyone anymore. Hobby Lobby nearly risked their existence too for the sake of something that the ACA already had a work around for.


That's right, the ability for individual employee's to get birth control insurance benefits when companies morally objected was already foreshadowed and written into the ACA before Hobby Lobby inspired the little bakery in Lakewood to also test the size of corporate personhood and the power of government mandates such things as serving the public without unreasonable biases.  No shirt, no shoes, no service is still deemed a reasonable bias.  but No Gay Cakes is not a sign or a practice that we can allow in America.

Should this be a required sign for Hobby Lobby applicants?

Shouldn't Hobby Lobby, however, have to now post a hiring sign that says, "God Hates Contraception and So Do We" or "No Birth Control", just so those people who attempt to apply for employment, but mostly have sex for fun, can be forewarned?

Defining religion is a slippery slope and all speech is a right connected to our practice of religion.  It seems to me, however, that when you start to add freedom to the practices of "religion and speech",they should always prescribe to decent behavior.