Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Volume
100:2
First Page
491
Abstract
(Excerpt)
I’d like to speak today about one of the more neuralgic episodes in the United States’s ongoing culture wars: the wedding vendor cases. These are cases in which small business owners decline, from religious conviction, to provide services for same-sex weddings. A baker declines to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple because, as a Christian, he opposes same-sex marriage and doesn’t want to participate in sinful behavior. A Christian web designer declines to create websites for same-sex weddings, since doing so would express her support for such weddings, which she doesn’t want to do. Other examples involve florists, online art studios, and photographers.
One shouldn’t exaggerate the frequency of these cases. Relatively few vendors in the United States apparently have reservations about providing services for gay weddings, though that may depend in part on where one lives. And even vendors who object to serving gay weddings don’t claim a right to decline to serve gay customers generally. To the contrary, they typically affirm that they willingly serve all customers, gay and straight. But their refusal to serve weddings has had great symbolic importance. It has also caused pain and offense for gay couples and occasioned litigation under state public accommodations laws that forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, First Amendment Commons
Comments
Available at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview/vol100/iss2/5/
Part of symposium entitled: In Search of Common Ground: Religion and Secularism in a Liberal Democratic Society