Glitz: The Problem Goes Deeper than the Cake

“When it comes down to it, most of us realize the cake a Christian baker refuses to bake for a gay couple isn’t just a cake—it stands for so much more.”

For a movement that began almost fifty years ago in the anger and violence of the Stonewall riots, last Monday’s Supreme Court decision about a gay couple’s wedding cake might feel a little paltry by comparison at first. A cake’s just a cake—right?

To a certain stripe of social conservative, of course, that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. Doomsayers online spread images of rainbow guns pointed at the back of bowed heads, ominously captioned “Gay Rights” and “Bake the F###### Cake, Bigot.” Baking a cake is listed after “tolerance” and “equality” as just the latest in a series of ridiculous requests from LGBT Americans—and one from which the Supreme Court obligingly rescued social conservatives.

On the other hand, cooler, more libertarian heads on the right claim to have their own reasons for making much ado about LGBT couples’ nuptial preparations. Even self-described libertarians like Pierre-Guy Veer, who is also gay, fear the consequences of coerced non-discrimination in public services, making comparisons to black bakers forced to make Confederate cakes and Jews forced to provide their customers with desserts celebrating Nazism.

Fortunately for black and Jewish bakers, the moral and legal conundrums these examples present are mostly confined to right-leaning writers’ imaginative think pieces. And fortunately for conservative Christian bakers, LGBT couples have yet to propose enslaving them or rounding them up and putting them in concentration camps.