The U.S. Supreme Courtruled in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a gay couple. WKAR’s Katie Cook has more.
The court ruled by a 7-2 vote that baker Jack Phillips did not get a fair hearing on the complaint brought against him by the same-sex couple, because the Colorado Civil Rights Commission demonstrated a hostility to religion in its treatment of his case.
Though the court’s decision is specific to this case and does not answer the larger question of whether business owners can refuse services to gay individuals on their religious objections, some in the LGBTQ community feel that this is a setback.
Daniel Wheeler-Pfau is an MSU neuroscience PhD student who identifies as genderqueer and works in a lab studying sex differences and sexual orientation.
“I think the most important thing that has come out of all my research is understanding that social support is basically life or death for the queer community. And this social support is sort of lost when these types of decisions are made. They can be very- can have a very large effect on the queer community.”
Writing for the case, Justice Anthony Kennedy went out of his way to say that decisions on specific cases in the future may well be different.