Amicus Brief: Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission

In Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court considered whether a bakery could use religious belief or free speech as grounds to refuse to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple. LRRP—then operating as the Public Rights/Private Conscience Project at Columbia Law School—joined Muslim Advocates and 13 other faith and civil rights organizations as amici curiae in support of Colorado's anti-discrimination law.

Our brief argued that overly broad religious exemptions from civil rights law would not protect religious liberty: they would undermine it. Our country's constitutional commitment to religious liberty has always entailed a commitment to non-discrimination, and the integrity of the former depends on the enforcement of the latter. Religious minorities, including Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh communities, are the primary beneficiaries of anti-discrimination protections, and weakening those protections exposes the communities most vulnerable to faith-based discrimination to greater harm in employment, housing, and public accommodations.

The Court's 2018 ruling was narrow, decided on procedural grounds specific to how Colorado had handled the case, and did not resolve the broader constitutional question. That question was taken up again five years later in 303 Creative v. Elenis, in which LRRP filed a second amicus brief alongside Muslim Advocates, making substantially the same argument.

For more on how anti-discrimination law and religious liberty interact, see our Q&A on Free Speech, Religious Liberty, and Discrimination and Liz Reiner Platt's op-ed on the trajectory of conservative religious liberty claims.