The key to Supreme Court fight, as is so often the case, will be Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is the author of the court’s four most important gay-rights rulings as well as one of its foremost champions of speech rights.
"He’s a big advocate of free speech. He’s also a huge advocate of same-sex marriage and gay rights," said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University Law School.
Short Conversation
The dispute began before gay marriage was even legal in Colorado. Mullins and Craig were planning to wed in Massachusetts and then hold a wedding reception in Colorado. Their reception site referred them to Masterpiece for the cake.
Almost as soon as they sat down in the bakery on that July day, Phillips told them he wouldn’t make what they wanted.
"I said, ‘I’ll make you birthday cakes, shower cakes, sell you brownies, cookies, anything else. I just don’t do cakes for same-sex weddings,’" Phillips said, amid the cookies and sheet cakes on display in his strip-mall shop in the Denver suburb of Lakewood.
Craig said the two men, who had brought along Mullins’s mother, were caught completely off guard.
"We were asking for a cake," said Craig in an interview in their Denver home. "We weren’t asking for a priest to marry us."
Civil Rights Complaint
The couple filed a civil rights complaint. State officials joined the case against Phillips, and a Colorado appeals court ruled against the bakery. The state court said Phillips wouldn’t be conveying support for same-sex marriage simply by decorating and selling wedding cakes on a non-discriminatory basis.