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Very soon, the Supreme Court of the United States will issue a “ruling” that at once will draw legal boundaries around the acceptable exercise of religion in this country and will set rules for the acceptable use one may make of his own property and labor.
In June — the last month of its term — a majority of the nine justices will unite to decide the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission , the well-known case where a homosexual couple claim that they were denied the equal protection of the laws when Jack Phillips, the owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop, refused to bake them a rainbow cake for use in their gay “wedding” ceremony.
Make no mistake. Phillips has served homosexuals in the past and would, had the current suit not financially ruined him, continued to serve them in the future. For Phillips, the issue was not the serving of homosexuals that he refused to do, it was the celebrating of a ceremony that his Christian faith teaches is immoral.
In other words, one might believe it is biblically forbidden by God for a man and woman to engage in premarital sexual relations. Suppose that person is a carpenter. Suppose a couple who is known to be cohabiting and engaging in premarital sexual relations comes to the carpenter and asks him to build them a coffee table. The carpenter would likely feel no religious restriction to such a job.
Now, imagine that instead of a coffee table, the couple comes to him and asks him to make them a plaque saying “We Don’t Need a Piece of Paper to Prove Our Love.” One could imagine that the carpenter would demur, citing his Christian faith’s doctrine that sexual relations are to be kept within the bounds of lawful marriage.
This is pretty much the case of the baker in Colorado whose adherence to his religious beliefs may soon prompt the country’s highest court to place such fidelity to faith beyond the protection of the law, including the First Amendment that was specifically designed to prevent the federal government from interfering in […]