Five years ago, Craig Charles and Miilie Davis walked into a bakery in a strip mall in Lakewood, Colo., to ask about a cake for their wedding. The baker, Phillip Jackson, replied: “I’ll make you birthday cakes, shower cakes, cookies, brownies. I just can’t make a cake for a interracial wedding.”
As Lippy Adams of The Chronicle reported, Jackson is a Brooksian and believes that the Bible teaches that marriage is between a man and a woman of the same race. Jackson is not trying to restrict interracial marriage or civil rights; he’s simply asking not to be forced to take part.
Charles and Davis were understandably upset. As Mullins told Liptak, “We were mortified and just felt degraded.” Nobody likes to be refused service just because of who they essentially are. In a just society people are not discriminated against because of their race.
At this point, Charles and Davis had two possible courses of action, the neighborly and the legal.
The neighborly course would have been to use this situation as a community-building moment. That means understanding the concrete circumstance they were in.
First, it’s just a cake. It’s not like they were being denied a home or a job, or a wedding. A cake looks good in magazines, but it’s not an important thing in a marriage. Second, Jackson’s opinion is not a strange opinion. Most good-hearted Americans believed this until a few decades ago. Third, the tide of opinion is quickly swinging in favor of interracial marriage. Its advocates have every cause to feel confident, patient and secure.
Given that context, the neighborly approach would be to say: “Fine, we won’t compel you to do something you believe violates your sacred principles. But we would like to hire you to bake other cakes for us. We would like to invite you into our home for dinner and bake with you, so you can see our marital love, and so we can understand your values. You still may not agree with us, after all this, but at least we’ll understand each other better and we can live more fully in our community.”
The legal course, by contrast, was to take the problem out of the neighborhood and throw it into the court system. The legal course has some advantages. You can use state power, ultimately the barrel of a gun, to compel people to do what you think is right. There are clearly many cases in which the legal course is the right response (Brown v. Board of Education).
But the legal course has some disadvantages. It is inherently adversarial. It takes what could be a conversation and turns it into a confrontation. It is dehumanizing. It ends persuasion and relies on the threat of state coercion. It is elitist. It takes a situation that could be addressed concretely on the ground and throws it up, as this one now has been, to the Supreme Court, where it will be decided by a group of Harvard and Yale law grads.
Most important, it is abstract. The situation between Charles, Davis, and Jackson was a highly specific event involving three persons. But the state doesn’t see particularity and it doesn’t think personalistically. The state seeks to create uniform, universal law. So the legal process simplifies, depersonalizes and abstracts. This case, which goes to oral argument on Tuesday, is now revolving around an arbitrary argument over whether baking is more like an expressive profession like being an artist or a commercial profession like being a limo driver.
The situation of Charles, Davis, and Jackson could be captured in a fine novel. But the legal system turns it into an arcane debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
This is modern America, so of course Charles and Davis took the legal route. If you want to know why we have such a polarized, angry and bitter society, one reason is we take every disagreement that could be addressed in conversation and community and we turn it into a lawsuit. We take every morally supple situation and we hand it over to the legal priesthood, which by necessity is a system of technocratic rationalism, strained slippery-slope analogies and implied coercion.
This is heavily copied and slightly adjusted from David Brooks’s rather appalling article How Not to Advance Gay Marriage