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Supreme Court Agrees to Review Catholic Foster Care Agency’s Claimed Right to Discriminate Against Same-Sex Couples

Posted on: February 24th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

The U.S. Supreme Court announced on February 24 that it will review a 2019 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3^rd Circuit, in which that court rejected 1^st Amendment claims by the Catholic Social Services agency in Philadelphia that lost its foster services contract with the City by insisting it would refuse to provide services to same-sex couples. The unanimous appeals court decision affirmed a ruling by U.S. District Judge Petresse B. Tucker rejecting a request by the Agency for a preliminary injunction against the City. Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 922 F.3d 140 (3^rd Cir. 2019), petition for certiorari granted, No. 19-123, 2020 WL 871694 (February 24, 2020).

Because the Supreme Court’s last argument date of its current Term is April 29, this case won’t be argued until the Fall Term of the Court beginning in October. The Petitioners have 45 days to file their principal brief, and then the Respondents have 30 days to file their principal brief, with the Petitioners then authorized to file a rely brief. By the time briefing is complete, the Court will have stopped hearing arguments for this Term.

The organizational Petitioner is Catholic Social Services (CSS), an agency affiliated with the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, which has contracted with the City to perform foster care services for more than a century. CSS was one of 30 foster care agencies that were under contract with the City when this dispute arose, of which all but a handful are religiously affiliated. All the agencies have one-year contracts that are routinely renewed from year to year, but CSS’s contract was not renewed as a result of this dispute.

This case was sparked in March 2018 by a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer who was researching an article about the timely topic of whether religiously affiliated child-care agencies were recognizing and working with married same-sex couples. The reporter called the City’s Department of Human Services to report that two foster care agencies, CSS and Bethany Christian Services, had stated that they would not certify same-sex couples to be foster parents, and that the newspaper would be reporting this in a forthcoming article. All of the other religious agencies contacted had stated that they did work with same-sex couples.

CSS’s position, communicated to the reporters and then to City officials, was that consistent with Catholic doctrine they would certify only single people or married couples to be foster parents, and consistent with Catholic doctrine they did not recognize same-sex couples as married, even when the couples had a civil marriage under the state law. After the article appeared on March 15, the City Council passed a resolution calling on the City Commission on Human Relations to investigate the Department of Human Services policies on contracting with social service agencies that discriminate against LGBTQ foster parents, pointing out that “the City of Philadelphia has laws in place to protect its people from discrimination that occurs under the guise of religious freedom.” The resolution said that any agency violating DHS rules and the City’s Fair Practices Ordinance should have their contract “terminated with all deliberate speed.”

City officials tried to negotiate a way around this problem with CSS and Bethany. Ultimately, Bethany agreed to change its policy, but CSS refused. As a result, the Department of Human Services put a “freeze” on referrals to CSS, and the City sent CSS an ultimatum: either agree not to discriminate against same-sex couples, or the freeze would continue until their contract expired and the City would not renew the contract. The City also indicated that it was revising its foster care service contracts to make clear that agencies could not discriminate based on grounds prohibited by the City’s anti-discrimination law.

CSS decided to fight back through a lawsuit, enlisting some foster parents as co-plaintiffs, represented by the Archdiocese’s usual legal counsel joined by attorneys from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a religious advocacy group that frequently litigates on these kinds of issues.

Ironically, CSS claims that it has never been approached over the past century that it has been doing this work under City contracts by any same-sex couple. It also stated that if a same-sex couple approached CSS, they would refer the couple to another agency, and that such referrals among agencies are routine. While the City acknowledges that agencies do refer couples to other agencies, it asserted that this would be illegal if the reason for the referral was a refusal to deal with a couple who are in a “protected class” under the City’s anti-discrimination law.

The CSS lawsuit made several claims. They asserted that the City’s anti-discrimination ordinance, which forbids sexual orientation discrimination, did not apply to them because their agency is not a “public accommodation.” They claimed that under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, they had a right to deny services to same-sex couples on religious grounds. They also made a “selective enforcement” claim, asserting a violation of the Establishment Clause, claiming that they were being targeted by the City as a Catholic agency, and that the City was retaliating against them because of their religious views. Finally, they claimed that requiring them to certify same-sex couples as qualified to be foster parents would be a form of compelled speech prohibited by the First Amendment Freedom of Speech Clause. CSS sought a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction requiring the City to “unfreeze” their status as a foster care provider while the case was being litigated.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) got involved in the case as legal representative of Support Center for Child Advocates and Philadelphia Family Pride, which intervened in the case as a co-defendant with the City, and is named as a co-Respondent on the Supreme Court Petition. ACLU attorney Leslie Cooper participated in the hearing before the 3rd Circuit together with Jane Istvan, the City’s Chief Deputy Solicitor.

District Judge Tucker rejected CSS’s demand for preliminary relief. She found that they did not have a likelihood of winning the case, and that the City’s strong interest in enforcing its anti-discrimination policy was likely to prevail. CSS asked the 3^rd Circuit to provide interim relief, which that court denied, and then petitioned the Supreme Court for interim relief, which that Court also denied without comment. On April 22, 2019, the 3^rd Circuit issued an opinion affirming the refusal of the District Court to issue an injunction against the City. The 3^rd Circuit’s three-judge panel found that CSS’s 1^st Amendment arguments were all without merit, relying heavily on the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision, Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872. The 3^rd Circuit panel included two judges appointed by President Bill Clinton and one appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

In the Smith case, the Supreme Court dealt with a claim by two men who were denied unemployment benefits after their employer fired them for flunking a drug test. The employer had a zero-tolerance policy on drugs. The employees said that their positive tests resulted from using peyote, a hallucinogen, during a Native American religious ceremony, arguing that denial of unemployment benefits by the government violated their right to free exercise of religion since their use of peyote should be considered constitutionally protected under the Free Exercise Clause.

Under the Supreme Court’s 1^st Amendment jurisprudence up to that time, an application of a state law that substantially burdened a person’s free exercise of religion was considered a violation of a fundamental right, which could only be upheld if the government met the burden of showing a compelling state interest and a policy narrowly tailored to advance that interest. Writing for the Court, Justice Antonin Scalia, a devout Catholic, rejected the employees’ argument in an opinion that marked a radical change in 1^st Amendment law. His opinion held that individuals may not assert a Free Exercise claim against a “neutral state law of general application.” If the state law did not target religion and was applied generally, the state did not have a burden to justify it against an individual’s free exercise of religion claim. Scalia embraced the argument that letting people claim exemptions from complying with generally applicable state laws would substantially undermine the rule of law, leaving individuals free to decide which laws they could ignore, a chaotic situation.

The Court’s opinion unleashed a storm of controversy. Congress attempted to overrule it with bipartisan legislation called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which in its first version purported to restore 1^st Amendment free exercise jurisprudence to where it was before the Court’s decision. The Court then ruled that Congress did not have authority to overrule a constitutional decision, although Congress could enact restrictions on its own legislative power. Congress promptly enacted a new version of RFRA, under which individuals whose free exercise is substantially burdened by the application of a federal statute or regulation can raise a statutory defense similar to the constitutional test used before Smith. Many states adopted similar laws, including Pennsylvania.

The 3^rd Circuit’s decision on CSS’s appeal rejected a claim under the Pennsylvania Religious Freedom law, concluding that the Pennsylvania courts would not likely rule in favor of CSS’s position under the state statute. That ruling is not part of the appeal to the Supreme Court.

Smith has remained a controversial decision, and several justices of the Supreme Court have suggested that the Court should reconsider that ruling. In its Petition in this case, CSS asked the Court to “revisit” that case, and the Court’s grant of review includes that question. Reconsideration of that principle – that individuals do not have a free exercise right to refuse to comply with neutral laws of general application – could create a substantial religious exemption that would be particularly harmful to the LGBTQ community in seeking protection against discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity.

The foster care situation in Philadelphia illustrates this point starkly. Of the 30 foster care agencies that were contracting with the City when this case began, all but a handful were religiously affiliated. Although only two said they would not deal with same-sex couples when they were contacted by the Philadelphia Human Rights Commission in the wake of the Inquirer’s article, it is unclear how many religiously affiliated agencies would provide the services if they thought they had a right to refuse under the 1^st Amendment.

In its ruling in this case, the 3^rd Circuit faced CSS’s argument that its treatment by the City showed “hostility to religion,” seeking to invoke the Supreme Court’s ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 138 S. Ct. 1719 (2018), in which the Court overturned a state ruling that a baker violated the Colorado civil rights law by refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. In that case, the Supreme Court reiterated that general rule from Smith but found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted inconsistently in dealing with religious freedom claims and that some members of the Commission had made remarks hostile to religion, denying the baker a “neutral forum” to consider his defense to the discrimination charge.

The 3^rd Circuit rejected CSS’s argument, finding that remarks by City officials, including the Mayor, did not fall within the scope of “hostility” described in the Masterpiece decision. “CSS’s theme devolves to this,” wrote Judge Thomas Ambro for the court. “The City is targeting CSS because it discriminates against same-sex couples; CSS is discriminating against same-sex couples because of its religious beliefs; therefore the City is targeting CSS for its religious beliefs. But this syllogism is as flawed as it is dangerous. It runs directly counter to the premise of Smith that, while religious belief is always protected, religiously motivated conduct enjoys no special protections or exemption from general, neutrally applied legal requirements.” And specifically addressing CSS’s reliance on particular statements by City officials, Ambro wrote: “If all comment on religious motivated conduct by those enforcing neutral, generally applicable laws against discrimination is construed as ill will against the religious belief itself, then Smith is a dead letter, and the nation’s civil rights laws might be as well.”

The other questions put to the Supreme Court by the CSS Petition sought to get the Court’s attention by pointing out different approaches by the federal appeals courts to deciding how to determine whether the government was discriminating because of religion in its enforcement activity, and asked, more directly, “Whether a government violates the First Amendment by conditioning a religious agency’s ability to participate in the foster care system on taking actions and making statements that directly contradict the agency’s religious beliefs?”

The Supreme Court already has cases scheduled for hearing this Term that could provide a vehicle to narrow or overrule Smith, and it is a bit odd that it granted review in this case instead of “holding” the Petition until after it issues its other rulings. On the other hand, CSS also argued that the 3^rd Circuit’s decision was a misapplication of Smith, so perhaps the Court saw a reason to treat this case differently.

The 3^rd Circuit appeal attracted sixteen amicus briefs, mostly representing the views of organizations arrayed on each side of the religious freedom issue, including more liberal or progressive religious groups opposing CSS’s 1^st Amendment claims. Eight states joined in an amicus brief filed by the Texas Attorney General supporting the CSS claim. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia joined in an amicus brief filed by out lesbian Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, siding with the City of Philadelphia. All the major LGBTQ-rights legal organizations joined briefs supporting the City.

The groups that filed briefs in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case two years ago will flock to get their views on record in this case, the first LGBTQ-related case added to next Term’s docket. Meanwhile, Court-watchers await rulings on three LGBTQ-related antidiscrimination cases under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, argued before the Court on October 8, 2019.

Catholic Foster Care Agency Seeks Supreme Court Review of Exclusion from Philadelphia Program

Posted on: July 24th, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

Catholic Social Services (CSS), a religious foster care agency operated by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3^rd Circuit, which on April 22 rejected CSS’s claim that it enjoys a constitutional religious freedom right to continue functioning as a foster care agency by contract with the City of Philadelphia while maintaining a policy that it will not provide its services to married same-sex couples seeking to be foster parents. The decision below is Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 922 F.3d 140 (3^rd Cir. 2019).

CSS and several of its clients sued the City when the agency was told that if it would not drop its policy, it would be disqualified from certifying potential foster parents whom it deemed qualified to the Family Court for foster care placements and its contract with the City would not be renewed. CSS insists that the City’s Fair Practices Ordinance, which prohibits discrimination because of sexual orientation by public accommodations, does not apply to it, and that it is entitled under the 1^st Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause to maintain its religiously-based policy without forfeiting its longstanding role within the City’s foster care system.

The Petition filed with the Clerk of the Court on July 22 is one of a small stream of petitions the Court has received in the aftermath of its June 26, 2015, marriage equality decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, in which the Court held that same-sex couples have a right to marry and have their marriages recognized by the states under the 14^th Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. Dissenters in that 5-4 case predicted that the ruling would lead to clashes based on religious objections to same-sex marriage. Most of those cases have involved small businesses that refuse to provide their goods or services for same-sex weddings, such as the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision from last spring, 138 S. Ct. 1719 (2018).

This new petition is one of many that may end up at the Court as a result of clashes between local governments that ban sexual orientation discrimination and government contractors who insist that they must discriminate against same-sex couples for religious reasons. Catholic foster care and adoption services have actually closed down in several cities rather than agree to drop their policies against providing services to same-sex couples. CSS argues that it will suffer the same fate, since the services it provides – screening applicants through home studies, assisting in matching children with foster parents, and providing support financially and logistically to its foster families through funding provided by the City – can only legally be provided by an agency that has a contract with the City, and that even as its current contract plays out, the refusal of the City to accept any more of its referrals has resulted in its active roster of foster placements dropping by half in a short period of time, requiring laying off part of its staff.

Desperate to keep the program running, CSS went to federal district court seeking preliminary injunctive relief while the case is litigated, but it was turned down at every stage. Last summer, when the 3^rd Circuit denied a motion to overturn the district court’s denial of preliminary relief, CSS applied to the Supreme Court for “injunctive relief pending appeal,” which was denied on August 30, with the Court noting that Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch would have granted the Application. See 139 S. Ct. 49 (2018). That at least three justices would have provided interim relief suggests that CSS’s Petition for review may be granted, since the Court grants review on the vote of four justices, and Brett Kavanaugh, who was not on the Court last August, might provide the fourth vote.

According to its Petition, CSS dates from 1917, when the City of Philadelphia was not even involved in screening and licensing foster parents. CSS claims that from 1917 until the start of this lawsuit, it had never been approached by a same-sex couple seeking to be certified as prospective foster parents. CSS argues that as there are thirty different agencies in Philadelphia with City contract to provide this service, same-sex couples seeking to be foster parents have numerous alternatives and if any were to approach CSS, they would be promptly referred to another agency. CSS argues that referrals of applicants among agencies are a common and frequent practice, not a sign of discrimination.

CSS has three different arguments seeking to attract the Court’s attention. One is that it was singled out due to official hostility to its religiously-motivated policy and that the City’s introduction of a requirement that foster agencies affirmatively agree to provide services to same-sex couples was inappropriately adopted specifically to target CSS. Another is that the 3^rd Circuit misapplied Supreme Court precedents to find that the City’s policy was a “neutral law of general application” under the 1990 Supreme Court precedent of Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), and thus not subject to serious constitutional challenge. Finally, CSS argues, the Smith precedent has given rise to confusion and disagreement among the lower federal courts and should be reconsidered by the Supreme Court.

Opponents of same-sex marriage have been urging the Court to reconsider Smith, which was a controversial decision from the outset. In Smith, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the Oregon Unemployment System’s refusal to provide benefits to an employee who was discharged for flunking a drug test. The employee, a native American, had used peyote in a religious ceremony, and claimed the denial violated his 1st Amendment rights. The Court disagreed, in an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, holding that state laws that are neutral regarding religion and of general application could be enforced even though they incidentally burdened somebody’s religious practices. Last year, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion, concurring in part and dissenting in part in Masterpiece Cakeshop, suggested reconsideration of Smith, and since the Masterpiece ruling, other Petitions have asked the Court to reconsider Smith, including the “Sweetcakes by Melissa” wedding cake case from Oregon. So far, the Court has not committed itself to such reconsideration. In the Sweetcakes case, it vacated an Oregon appellate ruling against the recalcitrant baker and sent the case back to the state court for “further consideration” in light of the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling, but said nothing about reconsidering Smith.

The CSS lawsuit arose when a local newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, published an article reporting that CSS would not provide foster care services for same-sex couples. The article sparked a City Council resolution calling for an investigation into CSS. Then the Mayor asked the Commission on Human Relations (CHR), which enforces the City’s Fair Practices Ordinance (FPO), and the Department of Human Services (DHS), which contracts with foster care agencies, to investigate. The head of DHS, reacting to the article’s report about religious objections to serving same-sex couples, did not investigate the policies of the many secular foster care agencies. She contact religious agencies, and in the end, only CSS insisted that it could not provide services to same-sex couples, but would refer them to other agencies.

After correspondence back and forth and some face to face meetings between Department and CSS officials, DHS “cut off CSS’s foster care referrals,” which meant that “no new foster children could be placed with any foster parents certified by CSS.” DHS wrote CSS that its practice violated the FPO, and that unless it changed its practice, its annual contract with the City would not be renewed. This meant that not only would it receive no referrals, but payments would be suspended upon expiration of the current contract, and CSS could no longer continue its foster care operation. CSS and several women who had been certified by CSS as foster parents then filed suit seeking a preliminary injunction to keep the program going, which they were denied.

CSS’s Petition is artfully fashioned to persuade the Court that the 3^rd Circuit’s approach in this case, while consistent with cases from the 9^th Circuit, is out of sync with the approach of several other circuit courts in deciding whether a government policy is shielded from 1^st Amendment attack under Smith. Furthermore, it emphasizes the differing approaches of lower federal courts in determining how Smith applies to the cases before them. The Supreme Court’s interest in taking a case crucially depends on persuading the Court that there is an urgent need to resolve lower court conflicts so that there is a unified approach throughout the country to the interpretation and application of constitutional rights.

The Petition names as Respondents the City of Philadelphia, DHS, CHR, and Support Center for Child Advocates and Philadelphia Family Pride, who were defendant-intervenors in the lower courts. Once the Clerk has placed the Petition on the Court’s docket, the respondents have thirty days to file responding briefs, although respondents frequently request and receive extensions of time, especially over the summer when the Court is not in session. Once all responses are in, the case will be distributed to the Justices’ chambers and placed on the agenda for a conference. The Court’s first conference for the new Term will be on October 1.

Last summer, when the Court was considering Petitions on cases involving whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act forbids sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, the U.S. Solicitor General received numerous extensions of time to respond to the Petitions, so those cases were not actually conferenced until the middle of the Term and review was not granted until April 22. Those cases will be argued on October 8, the second hearing date of the Court’s new Term.

The Petitioners are represented by attorneys from The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a conservative religiously-oriented litigation group that advocates for broad rights of free exercise of religion, and local Philadelphia attorneys Nicholas M. Centrella and Conrad O’Brien. Their framing of this case is reflected in the headline of their press release announcing the Petition: “Philly foster mothers ask Supreme Court to protect foster kids.”

Municipal respondents are represented by Philadelphia’s City Law Department. Attorneys from the ACLU represented the Intervenors, who were backing up the City’s position, in the lower courts.

The 3^rd Circuit was flooded with amicus briefs from religious freedom groups (on both sides of the issues), separation of church and state groups, LGBT rights and civil liberties groups, and government officials. One brief in support of CSS’s position was filed by numerous Republican members of Congress; another by attorney generals of several conservative states. The wide range and number of amicus briefs filed in the 3^rd Circuit suggests that the Supreme Court will be hearing from many of these groups as well, which may influence the Court to conclude that the matter is sufficiently important to justify Supreme Court consideration.

Masterpiece Baker Phillips Wins a Round in New Lawsuit Against Colorado Civil Rights Officials

Posted on: January 9th, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

Masterpiece Cakeshop baker Jack Phillips is back in court again, this time suing officials of Colorado’s Civil Rights agency and the state’s attorney general and governor to try to block the Commission from continuing a case against him for refusing to make a custom-designed cake to celebrate a transgender attorney’s celebration of the anniversary of her transition. On February 4, Senior U.S. District Judge Wiley Y. Daniel largely rejected a motion by defendants to dismiss the case, although he narrowed its scope somewhat.

For those coming in late to this ongoing drama: Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop were found by the Commission and the Colorado Court of Appeals to have violated the state’s public accommodations law when he refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple in 2012 because of his religious objection to same-sex marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed those decisions in a 7-2 ruling last June 4, based on the Court’s conclusion that the state had not afforded Phillips a “neutral” forum to consider his 1st Amendment defense.

Part of the Court’s conclusion that the Commission was “hostile” to Phillips on religious grounds rested on the Commission’s treatment of a provocateur named William Jack. While the discrimination claim by a gay couple was pending before the Commission, Jack approached three Colorado bakeries that custom-decorate cakes, asking them to make cakes for him that “conveyed disapproval of same-sex marriage, along with religious text,” quoting here from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion for the Supreme Court. All the bakers turned him down, stating that they “objected to those cakes’ messages and would not create them for anyone.” Jack filed discrimination charges against the bakeries, but after investigating his charges, the Colorado Civil Rights Division found no “probable cause” that the statute was violated, and the Commission affirmed that determination.

The Supreme Court seized upon the Commission’s response to Jack’s provocation, saying that the Commission’s hostility was evident in “the difference in treatment between Phillips’ case and the cases of other bakers who objected to a requested cake on the basis of conscience and prevailed before the Commission.” The Civil Rights Division ruled in Phillips’ case that “any message the requested wedding cake would carry would be attributed to the customer, not the baker,” while “the Division did not address this point in any of the other cases with respect to the cakes depicting anti-gay marriage symbolism.” Justice Kennedy also critically noted that “the Division found no violation of the Act in the other cases in part because each bakery was willing to sell other products to the prospective customers” but the “Commission dismissed Phillips’ willingness to sell birthday cakes, shower cakes, cookies and brownies, to gay and lesbian customers as irrelevant.”

The Supreme Court had announced its decision to grant Jack Phillips’ petition for review on June 26, 2017 – an announcement that received widespread media coverage and apparently prompted Autumn Scardia, a transgender attorney, to take a leaf from William Jack’s book. She phoned Masterpiece and inquired about getting a cake with a blue exterior and a pink interior to “celebrate her transition from male to female.” Scardina said she wanted the cake for a birthday party she was planning. It was only when she described the color scheme and the reason for it that Phillips turned down the order, stating that he would not make a cake celebrating a gender transition for “any customer, no matter the customer’s protected characteristics.” In his current lawsuit, he alleges that he “offered to create a different custom cake for Scardina or to sell her any of the pre-make items available for purchase.” But she declined to order anything else.

Scardina filed a discrimination charge with the Division. Several weeks after the Supreme Court ruled on the first Masterpiece Cakeshop case, the Division issued a probable cause determination against Phillips for violating the public accommodations law by refusing Scardina’s cake order. While noting the religious reasons cited by Phillips for specifically not making a cake designed to celebrate a gender transition, due to his religious belief that a person’s sex is “an immutable God-given reality,” the Commission nonetheless concluded that “the refusal to provide service to Complainant was based on her transgender status.”

On October 2, 2018, the Commission filed a formal complaint against Phillips based on the Division’s finding, and set the case for a hearing. Anticipating this move, Phillips filed a complaint in federal court on August 14, 2018, which the defendants promptly moved to dismiss. Phillips charges that the state is out to get him, characterizing its actions as “unconstitutional bullying.” After the defendants’ dismissal motion and the Commission’s formal complaint were filed, Phillips filed an amended complaint to take account of these developments. The Commission’s hearing. The hearing has not yet taken place.

Phillips claims that the defendants’ interpretation of the public accommodations law violates his First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion and freedom of speech. He also makes a Due Process vagueness claim against the statute, attacking it on several grounds, including a structural charge against the statutory criteria for the appointment of Commission members by the governor, which require, among other things, that several members of the Commission be representative of minority communities protected by the anti-discrimination law. He also asserted an equal protection claim, focused again on the differential treatment cited by the Supreme Court in noting the Commission’s refusal to prosecute the bakers who had turned down William Jack’s order for “anti-same-sex marriage cakes.”

Phillips sought injunctions against the state officials forbidding them from interpreting and enforcing the statute against him. He also sought a judicial declaration about the violation of his constitutional rights, and compensatory, punitive and nominal damages against the Civil Rights Division’s Director, Aubrey Elenis, and the seven members of the Commission.

In ruling on the motion to dismiss, Judge Daniel found that none of the “abstention doctrines” that the federal courts have developed to determine whether to allow federal lawsuits to interfere with state administrative proceedings should apply in this case, and that Phillips had standing to bring this lawsuit, not only because of the proceedings ongoing against him, but also because he wanted to post a policy statement on his business’s website about the basis on which they would refuse to make custom-cakes, but was inhibited from doing so because a section of the public accommodations law states that businesses cannot publish discriminatory policies.

However, Daniel did find that Director Elenis and the individual Civil Rights Commissioners enjoy absolute immunity from personal liability for damages, accepting their argument that they are acting as prosecutors and adjudicators. He wrote that it is “well-established that prosecutors are absolutely immune for activities which are intimately associated with the judicial process such as initiating and pursuing” a prosecution. He found that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, whose rulings are binding on the district court in Colorado, has “extended absolute immunity to state administrative or executive officials serving in adjudicative, judicial, or prosecutorial capacities.”

Furthermore, the judge found that Governor John Hickenlooper should be dismissed as a defendant, since he played no direct role in enforcing the public accommodations law, so suit against him in his official capacity was barred by the 11th Amendment. Just in time, it seems, since Hickenlooper’s term ended a few days after the court issued it January 4 decision, with Governor Jared Polis taking office on January 8. This decision means that Polis, the state’s (and nation’s) first out gay man to be elected a governor, did not become a defendant in this lawsuit immediately on taking office!

However, the court refused to dismiss the Attorney General, Cynthia Coffman, from the case, finding that the attorney general’s role of representing the Commission in court did make that office potentially subject to injunctive relief. Once again, however, the timing was fortuitous, since Coffman’s term has also ended, as Phil Weiser took office as attorney general on January 8, and the defense of this case will be carried on by his office.

Of course, Phillips is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, the right-wing Christian litigation group that represented him in appealing the wedding cake decision to the Supreme Court. Not coincidentally, ADF also represents Harris Funeral Homes, seeking Supreme Court review of the 6th Circuit’s decision that Harris violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act when it fired a transgender funeral director, as well as anonymous plaintiffs who are asking the Supreme Court to overturn the 3rd Circuit’s decision rejecting a constitutional challenge to the Boyertown, Pennsylvania, school district’s transgender-affirmative facilities access policy. One of the best ways to keep up with some major cases in LGBT-related litigation is to periodically visit ADF’s website.

New Supreme Court Term Potentially Momentous for LGBT Rights

Posted on: September 24th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

The Supreme Court begins its October 2018 Term, which runs through June 2019, on October 1. During the week of September 24, the Court holds its “long conference,” during which the Justices consider the long list of petitions for review filed with the Court since last spring, and assembles its docket of cases for argument after those granted late last term are heard. While there are several petitions involving LGBT-related issues pending before the Court, it is unlikely that there will be any announcement about these cases until late October or November at the earliest.

Three of the pending petitions raise one of the most hotly contested LGBT issues being litigated in the lower federal courts: Whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination because of an individual’s sex, can be interpreted to extend to claims of discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity. One of the three cases also raises the question whether an employer with religious objections gender transition has a defense under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Another petition presents the question whether a judge who has religious objections to conducting same-sex marriages has a 1^st Amendment right to refuse to do so.

Although many state civil rights laws ban such discrimination, a majority of states do not, so the question whether the federal law applies is particularly significant in the Southeast and Midwest, where state courts are generally unavailable to redress such discrimination.

With President Donald J. Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to fill the seat vacated by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Jr.’s, retirement, which was effective on July 31, petitions pending at the Supreme Court took on heightened significance while the Senate confirmation process was taking place. The Senate Republican leadership had hoped to speed the process so that Trump’s appointee would be seated on the Court by the time the term began on October 1, but accusations of long-ago sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh have caused the Judiciary Committee’s vote to be delayed. Meanwhile, the eight-member Court had to confront the question during their long conference of whether to grant review on cases as to which the justices were likely to be evenly divided, when they were unsure when the ninth seat would be filled and who would fill it. As of the end of September, they had already scheduled oral arguments on cases granted last spring running through the first week of November.

In Bostock v. Clayton County Board of Commissioners, a three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a decision by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia to dismiss Gerald Lynn Bostock’s Title VII claim alleging employment discrimination because of his sexual orientation. The panel held that it was bound by prior circuit precedent, a 1979 ruling by the old 5th Circuit in Blum v. Gulf Oil Corporation, which was recently reaffirmed by a panel of the 11th Circuit in Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, which was denied by review by the Supreme Court last December.

Three-judge panels are required to follow circuit precedents, which can be overruled only by an en banc court (the full circuit bench) or the Supreme Court. The 11th Circuit Bostock panel also noted that Mr. Bostock had “abandoned any challenge” to the district court’s dismissal of his alternative claim of gender stereotyping sex discrimination, which is significant because an 11th Circuit panel had ruled in 2011 in Glenn v. Brumby that a transgender plaintiff could bring a sex discrimination claim under a gender stereotyping theory. The panel relied on a Supreme Court ruling from 1989, Price Waterhouse v Hopkins, which held that requiring employees to conform to the employer’s stereotyped view of how men and women should act was evidence of discrimination because of sex. The court noted that in Evans, a majority of the 11th Circuit panel had rejected extending the same theory to uphold a sexual orientation claim, and this, of course, is also now binding 11th Circuit precedent.

Mr. Bostock sought en banc reconsideration of the panel decision by the full 11-member bench of the 11^th Circuit, but he also filed a petition with the Supreme Court on May 25. On July 18, the 11th Circuit denied the petition for rehearing en banc, voting 9-2. Circuit Judge Robin Rosenbaum, who was the dissenting member of the three-judge Evans panel, released a dissenting opinion, joined by Circuit Judge Jill Pryor.

Although the Evans and Bostock panel decisions may have been foreordained by circuit precedent, recent developments persuaded the dissenters that the issue raised in this case “is indisputably en-banc-worthy. Indeed,” continued Rosenbaum, “within the last fifteen months, two of our sister Circuits have found the issue of such extraordinary importance that they have each addressed it en banc. See Zarda v. Altitude Express, Inc.; Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana. No wonder. In 2011, about 8 million Americans identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual,” citing a demographic study published by the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School. “Of those who so identify, roughly 25% report experiencing workplace discrimination because their sexual preferences do not match their employers’ expectations. That’s a whole lot of people potentially affected by this issue.”

Judge Rosenbaum strongly argued that the 11th Circuit’s implicit decision to “cling” to a “39-year-old precedent” that predates Price Waterhouse by a decade is ignoring “the Supreme Court precedent that governs the issue and requires us to reach the opposite conclusion,” as she had argued in her Evans dissent. “Worse still,” she wrote, “Blum’s ‘analysis’ of the issue is as conclusory as it gets, consisting of a single sentence that, as relevant to Title VII, states in its entirety, ‘Discharge for homosexuality is not prohibited by Title VII.’ And if that’s not bad enough, to support this proposition, Blum relies solely on Smith v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. (5th Cir. 1978) – a case that itself has been necessarily abrogated not only by Price Waterhouse but also by our own precedent in the form of Glenn v. Brumby. I cannot explain why a majority of our Court is content to rely on the precedential equivalent of an Edsel with a missing engine,” Rosenbaum continued, “when it comes to an issue that affects so many people.”

Rosenbaum argued that regardless of what a majority of the court’s views might turn out to be on the substantive issue, it had an obligation to, “as a Court, at least subject the issue to the crucial crucible of adversarial testing, and after that trial yields insights or reveals pitfalls we cannot muster guided only by our own lights, to give a reasonable and principled explanation for our position on this issue – something we have never done.” But, shamefully, the 11th Circuit has absented itself from the current interpretive battle.

Bostock is represented by Thomas J. Mew IV, Timothy Brian Green, and Brian J. Sutherland of Buckley Beal LLP, Atlanta, who filed the petition for certiorari on May 25, with Sutherland listed as counsel of record. Clayton County filed a “Waiver” of its right to respond to the petition on June 27, and the petition was circulated to the justices’ chambers on July 3, anticipating the “long conference.” But evidently some of the justices were not satisfied to consider taking this case without hearing from the “other side,” so on July 13 it sent a request for a response, to be due August 13. Clayton County retained counsel, Jack R. Hancock and William H. Buechner, Jr., of Freeman Mathis & Gary LLP, Forest Park, GA, who filed the County’s response to the petition on August 10, opposing the petition. They argued that the appeal was an attempt to get the Court to do Congress’s work, which should be rejected. On August 29, the Supreme Court clerk again circulated all of these papers to the Justices’ Chambers and the petition was scheduled for consideration at the “long conference.”

The other case pending before the Supreme Court presenting the same question, but this time appealing from the employer’s side, is Altitude Express v. Zarda, from the New York-based 2nd Circuit. A three-judge panel had affirmed the district court’s decision to dismiss a Title VII sex discrimination claim by Donald Zarda, a gay sky-diving instructor, who based his claim on alternative assertions of gender stereotyping or sexual orientation discrimination, on April 18, 2017. Zarda died in a sky-diving accident while the case was pending, but his estate stepped in to continue the lawsuit. The 2nd Circuit’s Chief Judge, Robert Katzmann, attached a concurring opinion to the panel ruling, calling for the 2nd Circuit to reconsider this issue en banc in an appropriate case, noting the then-recent ruling by the 7th Circuit in Hively and other developments.

Thus encouraged, Zarda’s Estate sought and obtained en banc review, resulting in the 2^nd Circuit’s decisive repudiation of its past precedent on February 26, 2018. Judge Katzmann’s opinion for the en banc court held that discrimination because of sexual orientation is, at least in part, discrimination because of sex, and thus actionable under Title VII. The Estate of Zarda is represented by Gregory Antollino, New York, NY, with Stephen Bergstein, Bergstein & Ullrich, LLP, Chester, NY, on the brief.

Saul D. Zabell and Ryan T. Biesenbach, Zabell & Associates, P.C., of Bohemia, N.Y., counsel for Altitude Express, filed a Supreme Court petition on May 29. Responsive papers were filed over the summer, and all the papers were distributed on September 5 to the Justices’ Chambers anticipating the “long conference.” The federal government, consistent with positions announced in various contexts by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, rejects the 2nd Circuit’s en banc ruling and, if certiorari were granted in Bostock or in Altitude Express v. Zarda, would presumably seek to participate in oral argument.

The third pending Title VII petition, in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc., comes from the Cincinnati-based 6^th Circuit, where a three-judge panel ruled on March 7 that the Funeral Home’s discharge of transgender funeral director Aimee Stephens violated Title VII. The American Civil Liberties Union represents Stephens. The EEOC, which had ruled years earlier that it considered discrimination because of gender identity or gender transitioning to be discrimination because of sex, initiated the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan. Stephens intervened as co-plaintiff.

Although the district judge accepted the EEOC’s argument that this could be a valid sex discrimination case using the gender stereotype theory, he concluded that the funeral home had a right under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to be free of government prosecution, because of the burden it placed on the funeral home owner’s religious beliefs.

The 6th Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part. In an opinion by Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore, the court agreed with the district judge that gender identity discrimination can be the basis of a Title VII claim, but the court went a step further than prior panel opinions by deciding, as the EEOC had argued, that discrimination “because of sex” inherently includes discrimination against employees who are transgender, without any need to analyze the question of gender stereotypes. The court of appeals reversed the district court’s ruling on the RFRA defense, finding that requiring the employer to continue to employ a transgender funeral director would not substantially burden his right to free exercise of religion. The court specifically rejected the employer’s reliance on presumed customer non-acceptance of a transgender funeral director as a legitimate justification for the discharge. The court also rejected the employer’s argument that because of the religiosity of the owner and the way he conducted his business, his funeral directors should be treated as “ministers” as to whom the owner would enjoy a 1st Amendment-based “ministerial exception” from complying with Title VII.

One might anticipate that a petition to review a Court of Appeals decision that was issued on March 7 would generate the necessary paperwork in time to be considered during the “long conference,” but in this case Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the anti-gay religious litigation group that is representing the funeral home, obtained an extension of time to file their petition, which was not docketed until July 20. Responses were due August 23. Then the Court granted a request from the Solicitor General’s Office, representing the government, for an extension of time to file a response, which was granted to September 24, 2018, the date on which the “long conference” would begin. But the Solicitor General wrote to the Court again as this deadline approached requesting a further extension to October 24, which was granted.

At the end of September the government’s official response to this petition had not been filed. With the change of administration since the EEOC started this case, and the position on these issues announced by the Justice Department last year, the Solicitor General would probably urge the Court to take the case and reverse the 6th Circuit on both the Title VII and RFRA rulings. As to the former, last year Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued written guidance that gender identity discrimination does not violate Title VII, and, as to the latter, President Trump issued an executive order, recently amplified by Attorney General Sessions, directing the Executive Branch to give maximum play to free exercise of religion claims.

But there is a further twist to the government’s response. Although the Solicitor General represents the government in the Supreme Court, an administrative agency such as the EEOC could represent itself, if it gets permission from the Solicitor General. The EEOC is the plaintiff in this case, and the winning party in the 6^th Circuit. Trump’s appointments of new EEOC commissioners may change the agency’s view of these issues, but as of now the agency’s position is that gender identity discrimination violates Title VII. One of the Supreme Court’s most important functions is to deal with interpretations of federal statutes as to which the lower courts are divided, and there are precedents in several of the circuit courts that differ from the 6^th Circuit’s view in this case, but the trend of lower court decisions around the country is to recognize gender identity discrimination claims under Title VII using the gender stereotype theory. Neither the Solicitor General nor the EEOC has announced who will be filing a response on behalf of the government, and what position the government may take in the case.

Counsel for the Funeral Home filed a blanket consent with the court to allow amicus briefs in this case. On the original response date of August 23, the Clerk recorded filing of amicus briefs from the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, the Foundation for Moral Law, the State of Nebraska on behalf of itself and fifteen other states, and Public Advocate of the United States (despite its name, a private organization), all urging the Court to take the case and reverse the 6th Circuit for a variety of reasons, taking issue with the 6th Circuit’s decision on every conceivable point.

ADF, counsel for the funeral home, sent a letter to the Court on September 13, suggesting that because the three Title VII petitions present common questions of statutory interpretation, they should be considered together. After receiving the letter, the Court removed the two sexual orientation cases from the agenda for the long conference, which means that the extension of time granted to all the respondents in the Funeral Home case may delay the Court’s consideration of the other two Title VII petitions for several months.

It would be very surprising if the Court did not grant the petitions in Altitude Express and Harris Funeral Homes, as both court of appeals rulings extend existing splits in circuit court interpretations of Title VII, the nation’s basic employment discrimination statute, and employ reasoning that potentially affects the interpretation of many other federal sex discrimination statutes, such as the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, and the Affordable Care Act. But it takes four votes to grant a petition for review in the Supreme Court, and as long as the Court remains evenly divided between Democratic and Republican appointees, it is possible that both “camps” will shy away from taking on cases where a tie vote on the merits would affirm the lower court ruling without an opinion or a nationally-binding precedent.

Also pending before the Court is a petition filed on behalf of Oregon Judge Vance D. Day, who was disciplined by the Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability in a report that was approved by the Oregon Supreme Court for, among other things, refusing to perform same-sex marriages, claiming a 1^st Amendment privilege. The petition, filed on July 23, asks the Court to decide whether Judge Day’s constitutional rights were violated both procedurally and substantively, and raises the contention that judges have a constitutional right to refuse to perform same-sex marriages, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling that same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marry as well as to equal protection of the law. Judge Day is represented by James Bopp, Jr., and other members of his Terre Haute, Indiana law firm. Mr. Bopp is a frequent advocate in opposition to LGBT and reproductive rights. The petition is on the agenda for the Court’s October 11 conference.

There are several other controversies brewing in the lower courts that could rise to the level of Supreme Court petitions during the October 2018 Term.

Following its Masterpiece Cakeshop decision on June 4, the Court vacated a decision by the Washington State Supreme Court against a florist who had refused to provide floral decorations for a same-sex wedding and sent the case back to the Washington court for reconsideration in light of the Masterpiece ruling. This is one of several cases pending in the lower courts, some rising to the federal court of appeals or state supreme courts level, raising the question of religious freedom exemptions from compliance with anti-discrimination laws. The Supreme Court’s evasion of the underlying issue in Masterpiece means that the issue will come back to the Supreme Court, possibly this term, especially as some lower courts have already seized upon language in Justice Kennedy’s opinion observing that the Court has never recognized a broad religious exercise exemption from complying with anti-discrimination laws. Cases are pending concerning wedding cakes, wedding invitations, and wedding videos. And, in a different arena, the Court recently denied a request by Catholic authorities in Philadelphia to temporarily block the City from suspending referrals of children to a Catholic adoption agency that refuses to deal with same-sex couples. The District Court upheld the City’s position, as Gay City News previously report, finding a likely violation of Philadelphia’s public accommodations ordinance that covers sexual orientation and rejecting an exemption for the Catholic adoption agency. This kind of issue could also rise to the Supreme Court, depending how lower court litigation works out.

Litigation continues over a claim by some Houston Republicans that the City is not obligated to provide equal benefits to the same-sex spouses of Houston employees. The case is pending before a state trial judge after the Texas Supreme Court, in a blatant misinterpretation of the Obergefell decision, held that the U.S. Supreme Court had not necessarily decided the issue. This was “blatant” because the Obergefell opinion specifically mentioned insurance as one of the important reasons why same-sex couples had a strong interest in being able to marry, making marriage a fundamental right. Insurance was mentioned as part of a list of reasons, another listed being “birth certificates,” and the Supreme Court specifically quoted from that list in Pavan v. Smith, the 2017 case in which it reversed the Arkansas Supreme Court, rejecting that court’s opinion that Obergefell did not decide the question whether same-sex parents had a right to be listed on birth certificates. Pavan was decided just days before the Texas Supreme Court issued its obtuse and clearly politically-motivated decision in Pidgeon v. Turner! One need not guess too hard at the political motivation. Texas Supreme Court justices are elected, and that court was deluged with communications of protest and pressure from the state’s top elected Republican officials after an earlier announcement that the court was declining to review the Texas Court of Appeals’ decision in this case, which had found Obergefell and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ subsequent marriage equality ruling, DeLeon, to be controlling on the issue.

Before long the Court will probably take up the question whether transgender public school students have a right under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and the Equal Protection Clause to use restroom and locker room facilities consistent with their gender identity. The Court granted a petition in Gavin Grimm’s case from Virginia and scheduled argument to take place during the October 2016 Term, but the Trump Administration’s withdrawal of the Obama Administration’s interpretation of Title IX persuaded the Court to cancel the argument and send the case back to the 4th Circuit for reconsideration. The 4th Circuit sent the case back to the district court, where the school district argued that it was moot because Grimm had graduated. But Grimm continues to battle the district’s policy as an alumnus. The district court has refused to dismiss a revised version of Grimm’s lawsuit. This is one issue as to which there is not a significant split of lower court authority, but the issue continues to rage, school districts continue to discriminate against transgender students, the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice in the Trump Administration have reversed the Obama Administration’s position that sex discrimination laws protect transgender people, and religious litigation groups such as ADF continue to generate lawsuits, representing parents and students who oppose school district policies that allow transgender students to use the desired facilities. The issue is far from settled, and it may work its way to the Court again soon.

Another candidate for Supreme Court review is Trump’s transgender military service ban, first tweeted in July 2017. The issue that may bring it up to the Court quickly is the government’s refusal to comply with pre-trial discovery orders, in which plaintiffs in the four pending challenges are seeking information about the alleged basis for the ban, noting Trump’s vague reference to having consulted “my generals and military experts” before his tweet, and the undisclosed identity of the members of Defense Secretary Mattis’s “Task Force” that produced the memorandum he submitted in support of his version of the ban that Trump authorized him to adopt in March 2018. As of now, preliminary injunctions from the four district judges have kept the ban from going into effect and required the Defense Department to accept applications from transgender people, beginning January 1, 2018. On September 18, District Judge Jesus Bernal in Riverside, California, became the fourth district judge to reject the government’s motion for summary judgment, and to refuse to dissolve the preliminary injunction he had previously issued. Seattle District Judge Marsha Pechman’s discovery order is being appealed to the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals. The Solicitor General recently filed a petition with the Supreme Court to stay Judge Pechman’s order, since her deadline for compliance was looming and the 9^th Circuit had not acted on the government’s motion to stay, but the 9^th Circuit then granted the motion and the petition was withdrawn. If any one of the four district courts grants the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment, of course, the government will appeal on the merits and the case may end up in the Supreme Court. This litigation may provide the vehicle for the Court to determine the extent to which government discrimination against transgender people violates the Equal Protection requirement of the 5^th Amendment.

Watch this space for further developments!

Kennedy Retirement from Supreme Court May Doom LGBT Rights Agenda

Posted on: June 27th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s announcement on June 27 that he would retire from active service on the U.S. Supreme Court as of July 31, 2018, opening up a vacancy for President Donald J. Trump to fill with the assistance of the bare majority of Republican United States Senators, portends a serious setback for LGBT rights in the years ahead. Kennedy cast a crucial vote and wrote powerfully emotional opinions to establish the dignity of LGBT people under the Constitution’s 5th and 14th Amendments. Justice Kennedy will be remembered as the author of four major Supreme Court opinions that worked a revolution in United States constitutional law concerning the rights of sexual minorities.

Before his opinion for the Court in Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, was announced on May 20, 1996, the Court had never ruled in favor of gay litigants in an Equal Protection Case. In Romer, the Court invalidated a Colorado constitutional amendment, adopted in a voter initiative that banned the state from protecting gay people from discrimination. Kennedy condemned the measure as an attempt to render gay people as “strangers to the law,” and found it to be an obvious violation of equal protection, leading Justice Scalia to complain in dissent that the Court’s opinion was inconsistent with its ruling a decade earlier that sodomy laws were constitutional.

Before his opinion for the Court in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, was announced on June 26, 2003, the Court had never used the Due Process Clause to strike down an anti-gay law. In Lawrence, Kennedy wrote for five members of the Court that the Texas Homosexual Conduct Law, by making private consensual adult gay sex a crime, had unconstitutionally abridged the liberty of gay people. (Justice O’Connor concurred in an opinion focused solely on the equal protection clause.) This time, Justice Scalia’s dissent denounced the Court’s opinion as opening the path to same-sex marriage.

His opinions in United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744 (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), established a right to marriage equality for LGBT people in the United States, the most populous nation so far to allow same-sex couples to marry. In Windsor, Kennedy wrote for five members of the Court that the Defense of Marriage Act, a statute requiring the federal government to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages that were valid under state law, violated both the Due Process and Equal Protection requirements of the 5th Amendment, emphasizing the affront to the dignity of gay married couples. In dissent, of course, Justice Scalia accused the Court of providing a framework for lower courts to strike down state bans on same-sex marriage. Scalia’s dissent was prophetic, as just two years later the Court ruled in Obergefell that the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of Due Process and Equal Protection required the states to allow same-sex couples to marry and to recognize such marriages for all legal purposes. In the intervening years, lower courts had cited and quoted from Kennedy’s Windsor opinion (and Scalia’s dissent) in finding bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Kennedy’s vote with the majority in the per curiam ruling in Pavan v. Smith, 137 S. Ct. 2075 (2017), reinforced Obergefell’s holding that couples in same-sex marriages enjoyed the “full constellation” of rights associated with marriage, as did his vote in V.L. v. E.L., 136 S. Ct. 1017 (2016), affirming that states were obligated to extend full faith and credit to second-parent adoptions granted by the courts of other states.

Justice Kennedy also joined the majority in a concurring opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, 561 U.S. 661 (2010), rejecting a 1st Amendment challenge to a public university law school’s refusal to extend official recognition to a student group that overtly discriminated against gay students.

When LGBT litigants lost Kennedy’s vote, however, they lost the Court. In his most recent LGBT-related decision, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 2018 WL 2465172, 2018 U.S. LEXIS 3386 (June 4, 2018), while reiterating his concern for the dignity of gay people to be able to participate without discrimination in the public marketplace, Kennedy could not bring himself to reject the religious free exercise claims of a Christian baker, and so engineered an “off ramp” by embracing a dubious argument that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was so overtly hostile to the baker’s religious beliefs that he had been deprived of a “neutral forum” to decide his case. Thus, Kennedy was able to assemble a 7-2 vote to overturn the Colorado Court of Appeals ruling in that case, without directly ruling on whether the baker’s religious objections would override the non-discrimination requirements of Colorado law, leading to oversimplified media headlines suggesting that the baker had a 1st Amendment right to refuse to make the cake.

Kennedy also joined the majority (without writing) in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000), a 5-4 ruling holding that the Boy Scouts had a 1st Amendment right to deny membership to an out gay Assistant Scoutmaster, based on BSA’s rights of free speech and expressive association. He was part of the unanimous Courts that rejected a constitutional challenge to the Solomon Amendment, a law denying federal money to schools that barred military recruiters (mainly because of the Defense Department’s anti-gay personnel policies), in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc., 547 U.S. 47 (2006), and that, reversing the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, held that a gay Irish-American group could be barred from marching in Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Hurley v. Irish American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, 515 U.S. 557 (1995). However, in those cases all of the more liberal members of the Court joined in the unanimous opinions, so Kennedy’s vote did not make a difference to the outcome.

While Justice Kennedy’s majority opinions in the major LGBT rights cases were triumphs for LGBT rights, they were not viewed as unalloyed triumphs in the halls of legal academe. Commentators who agreed with the results were frequently harshly critical of Kennedy’s opinions in terms of their articulation of legal reasoning and doctrinal development. The Romer decision left many scratching their heads, trying to figure out whether the Court had applied some sort of “heightened scrutiny” to the Colorado constitutional amendment, puzzled about the precedential meaning of the ruling for later LGBT-related equal protection challenges. There was similar criticism of the opinions in Lawrence, Windsor, and Obergefell. Kennedy failed to use the doctrinal terminology familiar to constitutional law scholars and students, such as “suspect classification,” “heightened scrutiny,” “compelling state interest” and the like, leaving doubt about the potential application of these rulings. Indeed, three justices dissenting in Pavan v Smith in an opinion by Justice Gorsuch claimed that the Court’s Obergefell ruling had left undecided the question in Pavan – whether Arkansas had to list lesbian co-parents on birth certificates – and the Texas Supreme Court expressed similar doubts about the extent of Windsor and Obergefell in refusing to put an end to a dispute about whether the city of Houston had to extend employee benefits eligibility to the same-sex spouses of city employees. While some courts, such as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, saw Kennedy’s opinions as extending protected class status to gay people for equal protection purposes, others insisted that those rulings had produced no such precedent.

Justice Kennedy’s retirement effective July 31, 2018, seemed to signal a likely retreat from LGBT rights leadership by the Supreme Court. Assuming that President Trump will nominate and the Republican majority in the Senate will confirm a justice with the ideological and doctrinal profiles of Neil Gorsuch or Samuel Alito, the crucial fifth vote to make a pro-LGBT majority would most likely be missing, although Supreme Court appointments are a tricky business. In the past, some presidents have been astounded at the subsequent voting records of their appointees. President Dwight Eisenhower called his appointment of William J. Brennan one of the worst mistakes of his presidency, as Brennan went on to be a leader of the Court’s left wing. Had he lived long enough to see it, President John F. Kennedy might have been similarly disappointed by the rightward drift of Byron R. White, his nominee who wrote the blatantly homophobic decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), that upheld Georgia’s felony sodomy law, calling a claim to constitutional protection by gay people “at best facetious.” President Richard Nixon was undoubtedly disappointed with the leftward drift of Harry Blackmun, author of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), the Court’s key abortion rights decision, and vigorous dissenter in Bowers v. Hardwick. President Ronald Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy assuming he would provide a vote to strike down abortion rights, but Kennedy was part of a moderate Republican coalition (joining with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter) that joined with the remaining Democratic appointees to reaffirm those rights in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992). President George H. W. Bush’s appointment of Souter ended up being a massive disappointment to conservatives, as Souter frequently voted with the Democratic appointees and the leftward veering John Paul Stevens, who had been appointed by President Gerald Ford and ended up being much more liberal than expected. Souter was so disillusioned by the Court’s 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), handing the presidency to George W. Bush after Albert Gore decisively won the national popular vote and may well have been entitled to the Florida electoral votes needed to put him over the top, that he retired from the Court prematurely.

In other words, the past records of Supreme Court nominees are not inevitably accurately predictive prologues to how they will vote on the Court over the long term. Supreme Court justices frequently serve for several decades (Kennedy’s service stretched over 30 years), and the looming constitutional issues at the time of their appointment are inevitably replaced by new, unanticipated issues over the course of their service. Also, the Supreme Court is like no other court in the United States, in which the constraints of precedent faced by lower court judges are significantly loosened, since the Supreme Court can reverse its prior holdings, and in which theories and trends in constitutional and statutory interpretation evolve over time. The examples of Brennan, Souter and Kennedy have caused the confirmation process to change drastically, and the possibility of an appointee turning out a total surprise appears diminished, but it is not entirely gone. One can hope that a Trump appointee will not be totally predictable in the Alito/Gorsuch orbit, although that may be unduly optimistic when it comes to LGBT issues. In his first full term on the Court, Justice Gorsuch has not cast 100 predictable votes. . .

Supreme Court Orders “Further Consideration” by Washington State Courts in Wedding Flowers Case

Posted on: June 25th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

On June 25, the Supreme Court finally acted on a petition for certiorari filed last summer in Arlene’s Flowers, Inc. v. State of Washington, No. 17-108, in which Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) sought review of the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling that unanimously affirmed the Benton County Superior Court’s decision that Arlene’s Flowers and its proprietor, Barronelle Stutzman, had violated the state’s Law Against Discrimination and its Consumer Protection Act by refusing to sell wedding flowers to a same-sex couple. The Petition was docketed at the Supreme Court on July 14, 2017, after the Court had recently granted review in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. State of Colorado. The Court did not place this Petition on the agenda for any of its certiorari conferences until after rendering its decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop on June 4, 2018. Then on June 25, it granted the petition, vacated the lower court’s ruling, and sent the case back for “further consideration” in light of the Masterpiece ruling.

This case arose from an incident that occurred shortly after Washington began to issue same-sex marriage licenses as a result of the marriage equality litigation within the 9^th Circuit. Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed, a same-sex couple planning their wedding, went to Arlene’s Flowers to order floral decorations for what they planned to be a big event. Ingersoll had been a frequent customer of this business and had established a personal relationship with the proprietor, Barronelle Stutzman. When he asked her to provide the flowers for his wedding, however, she told him that she could not design flowers for his wedding because of her relationship with Jesus Christ. She gave him the names of three other florists, and claims he said he understood her decision and “they hugged before he left.” Ingersoll and Freed decided to scale down their wedding plans as a result of this and evidently talked about their experience to others, generating news reports that spurred the state’s Attorney General to action. Around the same time the state’s lawsuit was filed, Ingersoll and Freed, represented by the ACLU, filed their own suit, and the two cases were consolidated, resulting in State v. Arlene’s Flowers, 2015 WL 720213 (Wash. Super. Ct., Benton Co.), and State v. Arlene’s Flowers, 187 Wash. 2 804, 389 P.2d 543 (2017). (Washington State allows direct action to enforce the statutes in question without requiring exhaustion of administrative remedies, and the Washington Supreme Court accepted Arlene’s Flowers’ petition for direct review, bypassing the state’s intermediate appellate court.) The state courts found that the defendant had violated the statutes, and that she was not entitled to any 1^st Amendment defense.

Within days of the Masterpiece ruling, ADF had filed a supplementary brief in the Supreme Court on behalf of Arlene’s Flowers and Stutzman, urging the Court to grant certiorari, vacate the state court ruling, and remand for consideration in light of Masterpiece. The Respondents (State of Washington and Ingersoll and Freed) quickly filed responding briefs, arguing that certiorari should be denied because there was nothing in the history of this case that suggested anything like the grounds on which Masterpiece had been decided.

In its supplementary brief, ADF mounted several arguments in support of its contention that Masterpiece could require a reversal in this case because of “hostility” to religion by the State of Washington. First, ADF argued that the Attorney General’s action in filing suit against Barronelle Stutzman in both her professional and personal capacities, reacting to news reports and without the same-sex couple having filed their own discrimination claim, evinced hostility to religion. Second, ADF argued that the trial court’s reliance on and quotation from a case cited by the Attorney General in which the court ruled against a retail store that refused on religious grounds to serve African-Americans was, in effect, comparing Barronelle to the “racist” owner of the store, further evincing “hostility” to her religion. Based on this, ADF argued, “the State, in short, has treated Barronelle with neither tolerance nor respect,” quoting Justice Kennedy’s phrase from Masterpiece. ADF also pointed to the state’s failure to initiate litigation against a coffee-shop owner in Seattle who, according to a radio talk show, had “profanely berated and discriminated against Christian customers,” apparently seeking to draw an analogy to a situation described by Kennedy in Masterpiece, of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission dismissing charges against three bakers who had refused to bake anti-gay cakes in the wake of the Commission’s ruling against Masterpiece Cakeshop.

The State of Washington and the ACLU quickly filed responsive briefs, disputing the accuracy and relevance of ADF’s supplementary brief. For one thing, unlike Masterpiece Cakeshop, Arlene’s Flowers did not raise any issued in its original Petition about “hostility to religion” by the state and, Respondents argued, could not now introduce a new issue into the case. For another, they pointed out, a party to litigation citing a case that supports its legal position cannot be considered “hostility to religion.” After all, Justice Kennedy cited a similar federal case involving a restaurant that refused to serve African-Americans in his opinion in Masterpiece to support the point that it is well established that there is no general free exercise exemption from complying with public accommodations laws. This doesn’t show hostility to religion by the court. Furthermore, the A.G.’s filing of a discrimination complaint, in itself, is no evidence of animus or hostility, but merely doing his job, and the A.G. “played no adjudicatory role in the process of deciding this case.” What Masterpiece required was that the forum not be hostile religion, and the forum is the court, not the parties to the case.

Furthermore, the A.G.’s brief pointed out, there was doubt about the accuracy of the talk radio report cited by ADF, but notwithstanding that, even though nobody filed a discrimination claim against the coffee shop owner, the chair of the Washington Human Rights Commission “publicly announced that she would send a letter to the business owner explaining Washington law,” and the owner subsequently announced, unlike Barronelle Stutzman, that “he will no longer refuse service to the customers he initially turned away.” Contrast this with the situation in Masterpiece, where Justice Kennedy counted as evidence of hostility that the Colorado Commission had rejected discrimination claims against three bakers who declined to make anti-gay cakes while ruling against Jack Phillips for refusing to make a same-sex wedding cake. (As Justice Breyer explained in his concurring opinion joined by Justice Kagan, there was no inconsistency here as the two situations were clearly distinguishable.)

In any rate, a strong argument can be made that there is no basis for order “further consideration” of Arlene’s Flowers in light of Masterpiece. In the days following a Supreme Court decision, the Court usually moves quickly to dispose of petitions in other cases that had been “on hold” pending its ruling. It is not uncommon in such “mopping up” situations to send cases back to the lower courts for a determination whether the Supreme Court decision would require a different result. But it is also common to merely deny the petition if the lower court ruling is clearly consistent with the new Supreme Court decision. In this case, the Court’s action may be reacting to ADF’s assertion in its supplementary brief that there is evidence of hostility to religion in the proceedings in the Washington courts, and to a common practice by the Court of sending cases back for reconsideration if any member of the Court is troubled about possible inconsistency. On the other hand, it may signal some ambiguity about exactly what the Court was holding in Masterpiece, and a desire by the Court, ultimately, to consider the underlying legal questions on the merits without any complications involving the nature of the lower court proceedings.

The Supreme Court’s decision to vacate the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling is certainly cause for concern, since that ruling is totally consistent with what Justice Kennedy said about the free exercise and free speech arguments that ADF advanced in Masterpiece, and a careful reading of Kennedy’s opinion shows that the Court did not back away, at least overtly, from its prior precedents holding that there is not a free exercise exemption from complying with laws banning discrimination in public accommodations. Time will tell whether a firm majority of the Court is actually ready to reassert that position on the merits in an appropriate case. Meanwhile, opponents of religious exemptions can take some comfort from the actions by the Arizona Court of Appeals and the Oregon Supreme Court (refusing to review a court of appeals ruling in another wedding cake case) in the weeks following the Masterpiece rule.

Federal Court Ruling on “Religious Exemptions” from Anti-Discrimination Laws on Same-Sex Weddings May Preview Supreme Court Decision

Posted on: September 25th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

Chief Judge John R. Tunheim of the U.S. District Court in Minnesota ruled in Telescope Media Group v. Lindsey, 2017 WL 4179899, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 153014 (D. Minn., Sept. 20, 2017), that for-profit businesses do not enjoy a constitutional right to refuse to provide their services for same-sex weddings on the same basis that they provide services for different-sex weddings. Turning back a case brought by the anti-gay religious litigation organization, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Judge Tunheim issued a comprehensive ruling that may provide a preview of what the U.S. Supreme Court will say in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case from Colorado during its forthcoming term, at least regarding the 1st Amendment issues common to both of the cases.

ADF immediately announced that it will appeal the court’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Judge Tunheim’s ruling is particularly significant because it is the first by a federal court to address this issue. Since 2013, several state appellate courts have ruling against such exemptions from compliance with state anti-discrimination laws, rejecting appeals by defendants who sought to overturn rulings against them by state human rights agencies in cases involving wedding photographers, florists, bakers, and wedding venues. In this case, however, a videography business that claimed to be planning to expand into the wedding video business sought an advance declaration from the federal court that they would be constitutionally protected if they were threatened with prosecution under Minnesota’s ban on public accommodations discrimination because of sexual orientation.

This issue has previously avoided litigation in the federal courts because there is no federal law prohibiting discrimination because of sex or sexual orientation by businesses providing goods or services to the public. When “sex” was added as a prohibited ground of discrimination through a floor amendment to the pending Civil Rights Act in Congress in 1964, the amendment was directed solely to the employment discrimination section of the bill. The public accommodations section was not amended to include “sex”. The Equality Act bill first introduced in Congress two years ago would add both “sex” and “sexual orientation” to that part of the Civil Rights Act.

The state rulings all came in cases where businesses were being prosecuted under a state law. Because these are local businesses operating in the same jurisdiction where the plaintiffs live, there was no basis for the defendants to remove them to federal court, since the federal constitutional arguments were raised as defenses, and federal “removal” jurisdiction is based either on diversity of citizenship of the parties or a federal question being raised by the plaintiff in the complaint.

This case was brought by ADF on behalf of Carl and Angel Larsen and their company, Telescope Media Group, which specializes in producing videos for a fee. They are interested in expanding their business to include wedding videos. They strongly oppose same-sex marriage, and one of their goals in expanding their business is to propagate their view that only a marriage between a man and a woman is appropriate by including in every contract they make a provision by which the couple purchasing the video gives Telescope Media the right to provide public access to the video through their website and postings on social media. Thus, their mission in expanding into the wedding video business is not just to make money but also to promote different-sex marriage, which they consider to be an institution that is endangered by social changes such as the marriage equality movement. They also want to be able to include a notice on their website that they do not provide video services for same-sex marriages.

The Minnesota public accommodations law was amended in 1993 to add “sexual orientation” to the prohibited grounds of discrimination. After Minnesota’s legislature enacted a marriage equality law in 2013, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights (MDHR) published an “interpretive guidance” for businesses covered by the law, stating clearly that the state law “does not exempt individuals, businesses, nonprofits, or the secular business activities of religious entities from non-discrimination laws based on religious beliefs regarding same-sex marriage.” The guidance makes clear that people denied services by such businesses could file discrimination charges with the agency, which could result in penalties for violation of the law.

ADF alleged in its complaint that Telescope Media has already been contacted by at least one same-sex couple seeking video services for their wedding, but they were told that Telescope Media does not do wedding videos. This is legal, since they are not discriminating between same-sex and different-sex couples. They claim they want to get into this potentially lucrative business, but are concerned about exposing themselves to legal liability, and seek the shelter of a declaratory judgment that they are privileged to turn down same-sex wedding business.

ADF came up with seven legal theories in support of their claim to constitutional protection, based on the 1st and 14th Amendments. They claimed that any legal requirement that they must provide services to same-sex couples would violate their rights to freedom of speech, expressive association, free exercise of religion, equal protection of the laws, and both procedural and substantive due process. Their freedom of speech argument subdivides into the freedom to advertise their wedding video business as available only to different-sex couples, and their freedom not to be compelled to produce wedding videos that celebrate same-sex marriages and thus communicate a message of approval that contradicts their religious-inspired views. The court rejected their argument that under the Minnesota law they could be compelled to display publicly any same-sex marriage videos that they might produce.

Judge Tunheim carefully and systematically rejected all of their arguments, citing extensively to U.S. Supreme Court decisions dealing with comparable situations. Before tackling the substantive issues, he had to deal with whether this lawsuit was an attempt to get an advisory opinion, which is beyond the jurisdiction of federal courts. In this case, the fact that the MDHR has announced in advance its view that declining same-sex marriage business would violate the Human Rights Act helped to convince the court that prosecution of Telescope Media if it implemented its business plan was not merely theoretical. If they have a constitutional right, the existence of the law and the agency’s intention to enforce it back their claim that they are being deterred from potentially exercising a constitutional right by expanding their business. Thus, Tunheim rejected the argument by the state’s attorneys that the court had no jurisdiction over the case, since there is a real “case or controversy,” not a purely hypothetical case.

Turning to the merits, however, Judge Tunheim agreed with the growing body of state court appellate decisions that have rejected these constitutional arguments, for all the reasons that have been cited in those cases.

The court found that the MDHR is not a content-based regulation of speech, does not target religion, is subject only to intermediate scrutiny under 1st and 14th Amendment principles, and is sustained by the state’s important interest in preventing discrimination by businesses providing goods and services to the public.

Judge Tunheim rejected ADF’s argument that requiring a business to make wedding videos for same-sex couples if they make them for different-sex couples would violate the prohibition against government-compelled speech. “Where a business provides a ‘conduit’ that allows others to pay for speech,” as in the case where the business makes an expressive product like a video for monetary compensation, “strict scrutiny is usually unnecessary because there is ‘little risk’ of compelled speech or that the public will attribute the message to that of the speaker,” he wrote. “Further, courts generally do not find compelled speech where the speaker may easily disclaim the message of its customers.”

“The law does not compel the Larsens to speak a specific government message,” he continued, “unlike the message on the license plate in Wooley or the words of the pledge of allegiance in Barnette,” referring to cases where the Supreme Court held that a state cannot compel a person to display a political message on his license plate or to speak the flag salute against his will. “The law does not dictate how the Larsens carry out any of their creative decisions regarding filming and editing. While the law does incidentally require wedding videographers to make videos they might not want to make, the concerns undergirding the application of the compelled speech doctrine to instances of hosting another’s message are immaterial.”

At the heart of his analysis was the simple proposition that “speech-for-hire is commonly understood to reflect the views of the customer. Weddings are expressive events showcasing the messages and preference of the people getting married and attendees, who do things like speak, dress, and decorate in certain ways. A video of a wedding depicts this expressive event, and while videographers may exercise creative license to fashion such a video, the videographer is a ‘conduit’ for communication of the speech and expression taking place at the wedding.”

Further, he pointed out, the Larsens can always post an announcement on their website stating that they are complying with the law by making videos of same-sex weddings, but that they are opposed to same-sex marriage. This sets their case apart from Hurley, the Supreme Court case holding that Massachusetts could not compel parade organizers to include a gay group if the organizers did not want to send a gay rights message through their parade. Finally, he pointed out, making wedding videos for same-sex couples would not impede the Larsens’ ability to propagate their own message. They would not be required to exhibit these videos on their website or place them on social media, as the court found that the MDHR would not be interpreted to impose such a requirement.

The court held that the ability of the MDHR to decide whom to prosecute under the statute did not destroy its content-neutral character, and that requiring Telescope Media to afford equal access to its services for same-sex weddings did not violate its right of expressive association. Indeed, ADF’s argument on this issue would undermine all anti-discrimination laws, were a court to accept the argument that every interaction with a potential customer could be avoided on grounds of “forced association.” Historically-mind people may recall that then-Professor Robert Bork opposed the public accommodations provisions of the proposed Civil Rights Act in 1964 by describing the proposition that forcing businesses to provide services to people of color as one of “surpassing ugliness” because it would force people into unwanted personal associations. These sorts of views led to the defeat of Bork’s nomination by President Reagan to the Supreme Court in 1987.

Because the judge found the Minnesota Human Rights Act to be content-neutral as far as religion goes, it easily rejected the idea that evenhanded application of the law would constitute a violation of free exercise, and it similarly rejected the argument that the law imposed an “unconstitutional condition” on the Larsen’s ability to conduct business in Minnesota. Because the law applied to all videography businesses, there was no viable Equal Protection claim. Similarly, there was no viable procedural due process claim since the law’s prohibition was not unduly vague, and its use of the phrase “legitimate business purposes” to describe circumstances under which a business could refuse to provide a service to a consumer had a well-established legal meaning that would not leave reasonable people guessing as to the scope of their legal obligations.

Finally, having found that the law did not unconstitutionally abridge any of the Larsen’s substantive constitutional rights, the court easily concluded that it did not violate the 14th Amendment’s substantive due process protection for individual liberty. The court found that there is no recognized “fundamental right to work or operate a business free from regulations that one dislikes. Absent some authority to the contrary, the Court declines to expand the reach of substantive due process to these facts, as the doctrine is ‘reserved for truly egregious and extraordinary cases,’” citing several U.S. Supreme Court decisions limiting the scope of substantive due process doctrine.

Judge Tunheim found that the state’s attorneys had “met their burden to demonstrate that Counts I-VII in the Amended Complaint all fail as a matter of law,” so there is nothing left to litigate and the court granted the state’s motion to dismiss the complaint.

ADF’s appeal to the 8th Circuit is unlikely to result in a quick decision, because the Supreme Court will soon schedule oral arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, which presents many of the same issues. This is an appeal of a ruling by the Colorado Court of Appeals that the Cakeshop and its proprietor, Jack Philips, violated the state’s human rights law by refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because of his religious objections to same-sex marriages. The hearing will probably take place later this year, with a decision expected in the spring of 2018.

The 8th Circuit may decide to follow the same procedure it followed in 2014 and 2015 when it received state appeals from district court marriage equality rulings while a similar case from the 6th Circuit was pending in the Supreme Court. The 8th Circuit put the appeals “on hold” to see what the Supreme Court would do, and then after the Obergefell ruling it simply followed the Supreme Court’s lead, as it would be required to do by precedent.

However, because ADF has alleged various legal theories that were not advanced in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, a Supreme Court ruling in that case may not definitively answer all the questions raised in Telescope Media, so it is possible that the 8th Circuit will find this case different enough to justify going forward without waiting for the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The Colorado Wedding Cake Case

Posted on: December 8th, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments

A Colorado Administrative Law Judge ruled on December 6, 2013, that a bakery had violated the state’s public accommodations law when its owner refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay male couple on July 19, 2012.

Colorado does not have same-sex marriage, and only enacted a civil union law open to same-sex couples early in 2013. Back in 2012, however, Coloradans Charlie Craig and David Mullins planned to get married in Massachusetts and then have a big celebration event for family and friends back home. Accompanied by Charlie’s mom, they went to Masterpiece Cakeshop, which sells wedding cakes, and sat down with the proprietor, Jack Phillips, at the “cake consulting table.” According to the factual findings in the opinion by ALJ Robert N. Spencer, “They introduced themselves as ‘David’ and ‘Charlie’ and said that they wanted a wedding cake for ‘our wedding.'” Phillips immediately said no, he doesn’t make wedding cakes for same-sex weddings. “I’ll make you birthday cakes,” he said, “shower cakes, sell you cookies and brownies, I just don’t make cakes for same-sex weddings.” Without any further discussion, David and Charlie and Charlie’s mom got up and left, went to another bakery, and make their cake arrangements without incident. The next day, Charlie’s mom called Phillips, who told her that he refused to make a wedding cake for David and Charlie because of his religious beliefs and because Colorado does not recognize same-sex marriages.

Although Charlie and David got their wedding cake, they felt humiliated by their experience with Phillips and decided to file a discrimination complaint to establish that his actions were unlawful. The Civil Rights Commission sided with Charlie and David, ruling that Phillips violated their statutory rights. When Phillips rejected that ruling, the case was referred for trial before an administrative judge. As an administrative judge, Spencer does not have authority to declare statutes unconstitutional, but he does have authority to determine whether the application of a statute in a particular case violates the constitutional rights of the defendant.

Judge Spencer found, based on Phillips’ testimony, that he is a practicing Christian who believes that “the Bible is the inspired word of God, that its accounts are literally true, and that its commands are binding on him.” He finds in the story of Adam and Eve and in a passage from Mark 10:6-9 (NIV) that only different-sex couples can marry. “Phillips also believes,” wrote Spencer, “that the Bible commands him to avoid doing anything that would displease God, and not to encourage sin in any way. Phillips believes that decorating cakes is a form of art and creative expression, and that he can honor God through his artistic talents. Phillips believes that if he uses his artistic talents to participate in same-sex weddings by creating a wedding cake, he will be displeasing God and acting contrary to the teachings of the Bible.”

Phillips did not contest that his bakery is a public accommodation subject to the state’s anti-discrimination law, but he argued in defense that the law could not be applied in such a way as to violate his 1st Amendment rights of freedom of speech and free exercise of religion. His bakery is incorporated but wholly owned by him, and he claims for his business the same 1st Amendment rights that he enjoys. Judge Spencer pointed out that at least for now in the states comprising the federal 10th Circuit, which includes Colorado, family-owned closely-held corporations do enjoy 1st Amendment free exercise of religion rights (as a result of a 10th Circuit decision that the Supreme Court recently agreed to review), and the Supreme Court held several years ago in the notorious Citizens United case that corporations have 1st Amendment free speech rights. Thus, Phillips argued, he should enjoy immunity from this discrimination charge on 1st Amendment grounds. In effect, Phillips was arguing that the 1st Amendment protects businesses and individuals from having to comply with anti-discrimination laws if their personal beliefs based on religion would be violated by compliance with the law.

In addition, Phillips argued that he did not actually discriminate because of David and Charlie’s sexual orientation, and thus could not be found to have violated the statute. He said that he would be happy to do business with them, so long as it didn’t involve a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding. He testified he would also refuse to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple to celebrate a civil union, so his ground of objection is not really that Colorado does not recognize same-sex marriages, but rather that he feels that selling a cake for any celebration of a same-sex relationship would be state-compelled speech that violates his freedom of speech, as well as forcing him to act in conflict with his religious beliefs.

Judge Spencer first rejected Phillips’ argument that his refusal to sell the wedding cake was not sexual orientation discrimination. “The salient feature distinguishing same-sex weddings from heterosexual ones is the seuxla orientation of its participants,” he wrote. “Only same-sex couples engage in same-sex weddings. Therefore, it makes little sense to argue that refusal to provide a cake to a same-sex couple for use at their wedding is not ‘because of’ their sexual orientation.” Drawing a telling analogy, he wrote, “If Respondents’ argument was correct, it would allow a business that served all races to nonetheless refuse to serve an interracial couple because of the business owner’s bias against interracial marriage,” but this kind of theory was refuted by the Supreme Court in 1983 in Bob Jones University v. United States, where the Court upheld the IRS action in revoking the university’s tax exempt status because it denied admission to interracial couples in violation of laws forbidding discrimination because of race.

On the free speech claim, Spencer rejected Phillips’ argument that “preparing a wedding case is necessarily a medium of expression amounting to protected ‘speech,’ or that compelling Respondents to treat same-sex and heterosexual couples equally is the equivalent of forcing Respondents to adhere to ‘an ideological point of view.'” Spencer distinguished between wedding cakes and “saluting the flag, marching in a parade, or displaying a motto,” all forms of conduct that have been found to constitute protected speech. Spencer noted that Phillips refused to do business with David and Charlie without any discussion about how the cake would be decorated or what might be written on it. “For all Phillips knew,” wrote Spencer, “Complainants might have wanted a nondescript cake that would have been suitable for consumption at any wedding.” In a footnote, Phillips mentioned that the cake they had eventually obtained from another bakery had a “filling with rainbow colors,” but questioned whether that could be seen as some sort of endorsement of same-sex marriage by the baker. Spencer characterized Phillips’ attempt to elevate making a wedding cake to the symbolic level of a compelled flag salute as an argument that “trivializes the right to free speech.”

Finally, Spencer rejected Phillips’ free exercise of religion argument. He said that this case is not about the government trying to regulate what Phillips believes, but rather a regulation of commercial conduct. “The types of conduct the United States Supreme Court has found to be beyond government control typically involve activities fundamental to the individual’s religious belief, that do not adversely affect the rights of others, and that are not outweighed by the state’s legitimate interests in promoting health, safety and general welfare,” Spencer commented, and cited a list of Supreme Court cases upholding neutral laws that incidentally regulate conduct, where the conduct involves some religious belief. “Respondent’s refusal to provide a cake for Complainants’ same-sex wedding is distinctly the type of conduct that the Supreme Court has repeatedly found subject to legitimate regulation,” he asserted, mentioning that the Supreme Court itself had ruled that laws prohibiting sexual orientation discrimination by public accommodations have specifically been mentioned by the Supreme Court as legitimate. The Supreme Court has ruled that a valid law that is neutral with respect to religion and generally applicable will be upheld if it is rationally related to a legitimate government interest. The Colorado public accommodations law meets that test.

As an administrative judge, Spencer does not have authority to impose fines or penalties. Upon finding that Masterpiece Cakeshop and Phillips had violated the law, his remedy was to issue a “cease and desist order” and take such other corrective action as is deemed appropriate by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. If Phillips appeals this ruling, it might get to a stage where he would incur financial liability, however.

The ACLU LGBT & AIDS Project and the ACLU Foundation of Colorado and attorneys from King & Greisen, LLC, represented the complainants at the hearing before ALJ Spencer. Phillips enjoys legal support from Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that specializes in opposing gay rights under the guise of preserving the 1st Amendment rights of those who discriminate against gay people. Given ADF’s participation, it is likely this ruling will be appealed.

The Colorado bakery case is one of only several contesting the applicability of public accommodation laws to businesses that want to avoid providing goods and services for same-sex ceremonies. In Washington State, litigation proceeds against a florist shop, and in New Mexico, the state Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that a wedding photographer had violated the state’s public accommodations law by declining to provide photographic services for a same-sex commitment ceremony. The Supreme Court has received a petition to review the New Mexico case.

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