re: SCOTUS Says You Don't Have To Bake That Gay Cake

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The gays will try to ban all cake making ingredients

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or the gays are about to get the definition of the word 'cake' changed

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People are certainly hypocritical on the issue. Just like always.

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These cases lay bare why the entire concept of "protected classes" is actually government sponsored discrimination.

We didn't get rid of Jim Crow. We replaced it and made it national.

Shorty, I respect you a lot. With that said, having read the opinion the Court clearly leaves open the possibility for a different result under different facts.

They even point out the ambiguity between refusing to make a special cake versus refusing to make a generic wedding cake.

You are spot on about GDPR.

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You are spot on about GDPR.

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We're not alone in our suffering

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And, if they have multiple principles at issue and only rule on some, it can be called narrow.

If it has multiple at issue and rule on all but one deemed very important by the individual writing, it can be called narrow?

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The broader issue here was 1st Amendment. The court, instead, ruled more narrowly, punting on the 1st Amendment issue.

So, even by your own definition of the word "narrow," it's still correct.

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The broader issue here was 1st Amendment. The court, instead, ruled more narrowly, punting on the 1st Amendment issue.

So, even by your own definition of the word "narrow," it's still correct.

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I fricking literally said in the first post you whined about that with the term being relative, it can be applied to virtually any decision.............so yeah.

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The gays will try to ban all cake making ingredients

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If it can save one gay wedding...

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If they were trying to mislead, they wouldn't have put the 7-2 decision in the 1st paragraph

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I don't think it's some grand conspiracy to mislead, but this byline from Reuters

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•The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a narrow victory to a Christian baker from Colorado who refused for religious reasons to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

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makes it sound like it was a 5-4 decision.

I understand it wasn't a landmark decision and the circumstances under which it decided are pretty specific, but the word choice in that byline/headline is poor IMO.

ETA - Calling it a "limited ruling" seems much more appropriate, but the wording isn't the end of the world.

Actually most SCOTUS cases are decided with big majorities.

Many are 9-0

LINK

One popular school of thought holds that the Supreme Court is by now effectively a political institution, that Democratic appointees on the Court sit there with the purpose of enacting Democratic policies and Republican appointees intend to enact Republican policies. In this telling, it is naïve to think that justices should be selected by their commitment to a particular approach to jurisprudence — unless that approach is to blindly support the legislation of one particular party. It is this school of thought at work when, for instance, commentators claim that a particular decision is “heartless” and ignore the question of whether or not it is good law; it is this school of thought at work when writers suggest that the Supreme Court could use a justice or two without a legal background, or when law professors suggest that perhaps the Constitution doesn’t have very much to do with jurisprudence anymore.

This school of thought is wrong. It is not merely normatively wrong — as if there were no benefit in having a stable, democratically established basis for law — but wrong as a descriptive account of how the Supreme Court operates. The Supreme Court is at times partisan, and the most hot-button issues do tend to produce 5–4 or 6–3 votes, but the vast majority of cases before the Supreme Court hinge on complicated cases of law that require the full expertise of the justices. Many of these cases are decided unanimously. In fact, a surprising number of politically contentious cases are decided unanimously or close to unanimously.


The most recent term, in fact, was the least partisan since the middle of the 20th century. Over half of the cases were unanimous, and only 14 percent were decided by a 5–3 or 5–4 split. To some degree, this can be attributed to the fact that the Court had only eight justices for much of the term, meaning the justices had to work to avoid tie votes, or to the relatively inconsequential roster of cases the Court dealt with. But even in a more typical term, approximately 80 percent of votes are in support of the majority opinion, and only about 20 percent of cases are determined narrowly. The 5–4 cases that get national attention are in fact somewhat anomalous.