Lux Lucet

Minding your own business is getting more dangerous all the time for ordinary Americans. Perhaps especially if they’re Christians. And if you don’t believe it, just consider the ongoing case of Jack Phillips, a baker from Lakewood, Colorado who’s found himself embroiled in a four-year-long dispute with the State of Colorado over his refusal to make a wedding cake in celebration of a same-sex marriage.

Phillips, a Christian, refused to make a wedding cake for Dave Mullins and Charlie Craig, a homosexual couple married in Massachusetts, during their visit to his bakery in the summer of 2012. Phillip’s refusal of service has set in motion a Kafkaesque series of legal battles in which Phillips was ordered to make wedding cakes for gay couples by administrative law judge Robert Spencer or risk facing fines, was likened to the Nazis by a member of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and was forced to submit quarterly reports about whom he refuses to serve and provide anti-discrimination training to his employees.

In the latest legal twist, Phillips was refused service by the Colorado Supreme Court, which elected not to hear his case. Apparently Colorado judges have the right to discriminate without suffering any consequences, but bakers who do so are in a world of hurt.

At bottom, this and other cases of this same ilk, are not, as many people suppose, matters of free speech or religious liberty. At its most basic level, this is a battle over property rights.

John Robbins has called private property, “the central economic institution of civilized societies” (Ecclesiastical Megalomania, 30). And if he’s right in his assessment, and he is, this says something deeply disturbing about a society that subjects a man who, quite literally, was minding his own business to the sort of legal nightmare Colorado has put Jack Phillips through.

The idea that business owners do not have the right to determine their clientele entered into American law through Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited privately owned businesses from refusing to serve customers on the basis of “race, color, religion, or national origin” While much of the Civil Rights Act is sound, Title II represents a disaster for property rights. Not only is it unconstitutional for the federal government to prohibit discrimination by private entities- and discrimination, as Walter Williams explains in the video at the top of this post, is simply another work for choice – but Title II set the precedent for states to pass laws punishing Christians who seek to conduct their business according to the Word of God and the dictates of their own consciences.

Phillips ordeal is nothing but a legal mugging in broad daylight. And not only do the ACLU thugs who have helped carry it out feel no shame, but they actually boast about their activities. Ria Tabacco Mar, the attorney who argued the case against Phillips on behalf of the ACLU is quoted as saying, “We all have a right to our personal beliefs, but we do not have a right to impose those beliefs on others and harm them. We hope today’s win will serve as a lesson for others that equality and fairness should be our guiding principles and that discrimination has no place at the table, or the bakery as the case may be.”

Now one would suppose that Mar, a trained attorney, would be bright enough to see the irony in her remark about not having the right to impose our personal beliefs on others. But apparently that’s not the case. For what is it that both she and her clients did but impose their belief about the goodness and rightness of gay marriage on a man whose Christian faith led him to a different conclusion?

Social Justice Warriors of Mar’s ilk, the ones who claim to oppose hate and intolerance, never seem to realize that they are the biggest purveyors of the very things they claim to stand against.

In the end, a business owner’s right to refuse service to anyone for any reason is rooted in the Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” We may not like the businessman’s reason for discriminating, and in fact his reasoning may be sinful, but it is not for the state to impose criminal sanctions on him. This respect for free association is a major test of a free society. And as things stand, America isn’t doing so well these days.