A California state court sided with a baker Friday in Kern County who declined to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding, after lawyers for the state questioned the sincerity of the baker’s Christian faith.
As Fox News reports:
Cathy Miller, a cake designer who owns the popular Tastries bakery in Bakersfield, California, won what her lawyers at the Thomas More Society called “a First Amendment victory” when Judge Eric Bradshaw of the Superior Court of California in Kern County ruled against California’s Department of Fair Housing and Employment, which had brought the lawsuit against her.
Miller was subject to multiple lawsuits after she referred a lesbian couple to another baker when they requested a cake for their wedding. Because of her Christian belief that marriage is between one man and one woman, Miller declined to design a custom cake for their ceremony, believing it would be tantamount to a tacit affirmation.
Fox News adds that lawyers for the state, either through ignorance or an attempt to intimidate her, tried to undermine the baker’s claim to her own religion during a deposition earlier this year, asking her why she did not follow the Bible’s dietary restrictions if she insisted on following its teachings on homosexuality.
The Thomas More Society, which represented Miller, published the exchange in a press release:
Attorney Gregory Mann (attorney for the state): Do you try to follow everything that the Bible says?
Cathy Miller: I do my best, but I’m a sinner, but I do my best.
Mann: Do you follow some of the eating practices from the Old Testament in terms of not eating pigs, not eating shellfish, et cetera?
In the New Testament, Jesus tells his followers that many of the laws and rules of the Old Testament, such as those about dietary restrictions, were to be fulfilled instead through faith in Christ.
In the 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled narrowly for a Colorado baker who declined to bake a cake for a gay wedding, saying that he was a victim of religious animus by the state — though leaving open the question of whether states could force people who object to gay marriage on religious grounds to provide such services regardless.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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