Lawyers representing the owner of Tastries bakeshop petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a case brought against her by a gay couple.
Eight years ago yesterday, Tastries Bakery owner Cathy Miller closed her shop early, hours after politely refusing service to a same-sex couple who sought a custom wedding cake.
Miller’s Christian faith forbids her from designing a cake that celebrates a violation of the Christian sacrament of marriage — which she explained to Eileen and Mireya Rodriguez-Del Rio, the lesbian couple. But hours after she met with the couple, Miller was flooded with a barrage of hate mail, death and rape threats, and threats of vandalism.
Four months later, the California Department of Civil Rights filed suit against Miller on behalf of the Rodriguez-Del Rio couple, beginning Miller’s almost decade-long battle fighting for her freedom of speech and religion.
“I couldn’t, in good faith, hurt my Lord and Savior and participate in this wedding,” Miller told National Review. “There was a lot of hate, there was a lot of anger, but God just stood beside us.”
Although a California Superior Court judge initially ruled in Miller’s favor, the state appealed the decision to the Fifth District Court of Appeal, which found Miller’s refusal unconstitutional. Miller appealed the decision to the Supreme Court with the help of her lawyers at the religious-liberty firm Becket in March. On Tuesday, Becket filed a cert petition on Miller’s behalf; if granted, the Supreme Court will hear her case.
Miller’s case is familiar to Jack Phillips’s, the Colorado baker and owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop who won his religious liberty case at the Supreme Court in 2018, after he declined to make a wedding cake for a gay couple in 2012.
Phillips’s case, however, was settled on the Court’s narrow procedural objections to Colorado’s prosecution of Phillips. The Court failed in his case to offer lower courts guidance on how to apply the decision to religious liberty claims in similar cases. Miller’s fight is “an opportunity for the Supreme Court to actually reach the issues that it ducked in Masterpiece, and settle them once and for all,” Keim said.
“We’re hopeful,” Adèle Keim, senior counsel at Becket, told National Review. “Cathy has persevered through the years. Eight years ago yesterday, she was locking up her bakery because of the outpouring of hatred and hostility. But eight years later, her brief is being laid on the steps of the Supreme Court.”
The Court also decided 303 Creative v. Elenis in 2023, a case that was brought by Colorado state against Lorie Smith, a graphic artist and the owner of 303 Creative design studio. Smith declined to design custom graphics for a same-sex wedding. The Court ruled 6-3 in Smith’s favor that the constitution protects her from creating expressions “that defy any of her beliefs for any customer.”
California has argued that Miller’s “refusal to provide the Rodriguez-Del Rios” with a “three-tiered, plain white cake with no writing, engravings, adornments, symbols or images” is not protected speech, since the cake the lesbian couple requested did not include any writing or images. The state admitted, however, that if the couple had asked for something like “Mrs. & Mrs.” to be written on the cake, Miller’s refusal would count as constitutionally-protected speech.
“They’ve done that because they know that under the free speech clause of the U.S. Constitution, speech is hyper protected — and it ought to be really protected,” Keim said. “They just had to pretend that a white three-tiered cake, covered with roses, served at a wedding reception has no symbolic meaning.”
State politics likely drive California’s relentless prosecution of Miller, Keim added. Firms like Becket warned a decade ago when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex union under Obergefell v. Hodges that “if constitutionalized without a clear recognition that there are millions of religious believers in this country who do not embrace same-sex marriage, not for bigoted or irrational reasons, but because of their alternative vision of what marriage is . . . that there would be significant conflicts that would emerge.”
Miller has continued to operate her bakery despite the hate and backlash. Many LGBTQ community members who support her right to practice her religious beliefs still patronize Tastries, Miller said, and over the last eight years Miller and her husband have taken the opportunity to share God’s word loudly.
“It is about honoring my savior. It is freedom of religion, which is a constitutional right,” she said. “I think if our nation can get back to that, honoring God, or allowing those that want to honor God, to honor God, it would go a big way in improving our nation.”