Have Your Cake But Don’t Eat It
NEW YORK—If you’re having a gay wedding, and your cake has been baked by a man who thinks gay marriage is an abomination against God, do not eat the cake.
I’m surprised I have to tell you this.
People like myself are in no danger at all because we learned years ago to never eat the wedding cake.
Quick digression for all men who hate weddings as much as I do: Volunteer to park the cars. It’s less boring than the reception, it makes you late for everything (“Sorry, I was parking the latecomers”), and the family thinks you’re a selfless dependable friend. You can also smoke.
But apparently, Charlie Craig and David Mullins didn’t get the memo, because when they walked into the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, in 2012 and met devout Christian owner Jack Phillips, they thought what was being discussed was just a cake.
Actually, to be precise, I think Charlie thought it was just a cake, but David had all his wedding-day fantasies tied up in the perfect symbolic cake, so much so that when they were turned away by Phillips because “That’s just a cake that I can’t do,” David broke down in tears in the parking lot. The Michelangelo of Colorado Cake-itecture had shattered David’s dreams like freezer-hardened icing hurled against a steel girder.
Wedding Cake Drama is nothing new, of course, and there have probably been at least a million prospective husbands who have said, “Let’s not make a federal case out of what kind of cake we have at the wedding,” but until now they were speaking metaphorically. Charlie and David, on the other hand, went to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and got a judgment against Jack for “sexual-orientation discrimination.” Among other things, the commission required Jack to institute “staff training” of his immediate family members. This would be sort of like reading your wife her Miranda rights. Forced with either designing cakes for gay weddings or breaking the law, Jack decided to shut down the wedding-cake business entirely, thereby sacrificing 40 percent of his business. But he appealed the case in hopes of someday reviving his quite elaborate cakemanship career.
I have several questions about this case, which came up before the Supreme Court last week, namely:
If you know the guy disapproves of gay marriage, why do you want him to design your cake in the first place?
Haven’t you ever watched Cake Boss or Cupcake Wars or Ultimate Cake Off or Amazing Wedding Cakes or Ace of Cakes? We know from reality TV that the more complex the cake, the more likely it’s gonna crumble like a Lego Ferris wheel being chewed up by a bulldog. All he has to do is put a crack in one of the main support struts and you’ve got angel food all over the Hilton elevator.
But even assuming the cake is structurally sound…
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