I wonder if this judge realizes just what he’s letting his profession in for. From The Oregonian:
A California bakery can continue its refusal to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, a judge in Kern County has decided — the opposite legal result that Oregon bakers faced after declining in 2013 to provide a cake for a lesbian couple.
The Gresham, Oregon bakery, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, became a cause célèbre for the conservative “religious liberty” movement. In December, the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld the state labor commissioner’s $135,000 fine against the bakery.
On Monday, California’s Kern County Superior Court Judge David Lampe issued a preliminary injunction. The ruling allows Tastries Bakery owner Cathy Miller, an evangelical Christian, to continue her refusal to bake a wedding cake for Mireya and Eileen Rodriguez-Del Rio.
And the basis for that ruling? The wedding cake has been classified as ‘art’, and an artist cannot be compelled to create art. I wonder how many other pursuits are going to be classified as ‘art’ – and how many times judges are going to be asked to confirm or deny that classification.
But the bigger shame, of course, is the refusal to deliver a wedding cake to a same-sex couple. It is a deeply divisive decision in American society because it’s based on a mistaken assumption, that a civil marriage is also a religious marriage, and, worse, it’s aimed at a class of Americans.
It’s one thing for an artist to be unable to come to an equitable fee arrangement with a client, or refuse to execute a particular artistic expression. It’s quite another to refuse to sell to a class of customers. In this instance of intolerance comes the principle of limited rights – where does my right to buy something end, and where does someone else’s right to sell a product of their own making end?
So I may think the judge messed up, but I also think it’s a hard question and can see Judge Lampe finding it a frustrating case.
Applying thoughts about sectors might help, if we stipulate an “art sector”. Certainly most artists will affirm that the need to make money in order to keep body & soul together is a serious burden on their time and energy, and some become grant-writing experts par excellence, as my Arts Editor has noted on several occasions in the past. In fact, the point of art is neither to make money, nor to produce art of any kind. The point is the ill-defined notion of self-expression.
And that is only occasionally conducive to collecting the money we use in this capitalistic system required to buy food, lodging, and artistic facilities.
This is only to give some context to the problems of the artist.
One final thought: If the decision had gone the other way, and a Satanist had requested a wedding cake of the baker in question, would the bakery be required to bake it?
