Supreme Court says lower court should reexamine case over same-sex couple denied wedding cake

CNBC reports:

The Supreme Court on Monday sent back to a lower court a case involving an Oregon bakery whose owners claim the state drove them out of business after they refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple.

In an order, the top court scrapped a ruling from the Oregon Court of Appeals in favor of the same-sex couple. The owners of the bakery, which refused the make the cake due to religious beliefs, claimed that state fines pushed them out of business.

The Supreme Court asked the appeals court to reconsider the case in light of a top court holding from last year.

In that case, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, the court ruled 7-2 in favor of a baker who refused to serve a same-sex couple. The court said at the time that the state of Colorado was impermissibly hostile to the baker’s religious beliefs.

The court in that case did not decide on the underlying question of whether a wedding cake qualifies as the type of artistic expression that is entitled to the Constitution’s most stringent protections under the First Amendment.

By sending the case back to the lower court, the justices handed an incremental win to the owners of the bakery while avoiding hearing the divisive case in the midst of the 2020 election campaign.

If you have to bake a cake you kind of are overturning the 13th Amendment.