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Charlie Craig, left, and David Mullins wait to speak to journalists after the US Supreme Court argued the case Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission in December in Washington.
Charlie Craig, left, and David Mullins wait to speak to journalists after the US supreme court argued the case Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission in December in Washington. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Charlie Craig, left, and David Mullins wait to speak to journalists after the US supreme court argued the case Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission in December in Washington. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

'This happens all the time': why a gay couple took their cake case to the supreme court

This article is more than 6 years old

A ruling over a cakeshop owner’s refusal to serve the couple could erode civil rights protections for LGBT Americans or bolster them

In July 2012, Charlie Craig and David Mullins went shopping for a wedding cake at a bakery in Lakewood, Colorado. Their trip will end more than five years later on the steps of the supreme court.

A ruling over cakeshop owner Jack Phillips’s refusal to serve them by the US’s most senior judicial panel could erode civil rights protections for LGBT Americans or bolster them.

“In addition to standing up for ourselves, it’s standing up for these people too,” Craig told the Guardian.

It started out on a day like any other before a wedding reception, the couple said, with a lot to finalize ahead of an October reception with friends and family in Colorado, following their marriage ceremony the month before in Massachusetts. “Charlie had a binder full of ideas and concepts but we never even got a chance to open it,” Mullins recalled.

Instead the couple – accompanied by Craig’s mother, who was visiting from out of town – faced a line of questioning from Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado.

“He asked who the cake was for,” recalled Mullins. “We told him it was for us, and he told us he would not provide a cake for a same-sex wedding.” A long pause followed.

“We were just mortified and embarrassed,” said Mullins. “The fact that Charlie’s mom was there made it all the worse because you don’t want to see your mom see you go through something like that,” he added.

“When we returned to our car, I noticed Charlie’s shoulders were shaking,” Craig’s mother, Debbie Munn, wrote in a first-person account in October. “As a parent, no matter how grown your children are, you want to shield them from harm. I felt I had failed him.”

The couple filed a complaint against the baker with the Colorado civil rights commission, which found Phillips had violated state law, and Colorado state courts also ruled in their favor.

But an appeal by Phillips means the supreme court will now decide – probably by June – whether to carve out an exemption to anti-discriminatory public accommodations laws currently protecting LGBT Americans in 20-some states when such protections can be said to conflict with another’s religious beliefs.

The supreme court has previously ruled against such cases argued on the grounds of religious freedom. But since the legal underpinnings of the plaintiff’s argument in Masterpiece Cakeshop lie in free speech rights under the first amendment, the case presents a new test.

After oral arguments in December, the supreme court has again been asked to resolve the case. And though the ruling on Masterpiece Cakeshop remains uncertain, the impact of the experience on the couple in question, even years after the incident, is decidedly less so.

“It really sticks with you and it’s almost surprising how much that memory becomes pervasive and is kind of always there,” said Mullins. “The big one that gets me is when I’m doing business with someone over the phone and I can’t really see how they’re reacting to me. I find myself caught on that word – do I say ‘husband’? Do I say ‘partner’? Do I say ‘friend’?

“It isn’t a good feeling,” he added, “that you have to think about whether or not you can even say you’re married.”

A Colorado native, Mullins said he had never experienced anything like the treatment they received at Masterpiece Cakeshop . And for Craig, who had moved there from a small town in Wyoming because “Denver was the closest thing to a place where I could be myself,” the sting was particularly acute.

“All the other venues we went to never asked anything about our personal lives,” Craig said.

Since the incident, same-sex marriage has become the law of the land in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, but nevertheless, he said, “we really have to think twice for the fear of not being served the same.”

Public accommodations laws protecting against such discrimination were first instituted during the civil rights era with the aim of preventing businesses from refusing to serve black customers. But if the court rules with the plaintiff in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, such protections could be moot.

Coming amid a host of other measures to roll back LGBT rights achieved under the Obama administration, the potential for such a setback is all the more alarming for Craig and Mullins.

None of this is anything like what they had in mind when they went cake-shopping back in 2012 – in fact Mullins recalled saying expressly early on that he didn’t want politics to figure into the wedding.

“It’s hard to have your marriage under a microscope,” he said. “It’s something no one should have to go through,” he said. “I feel like sometimes people get caught up with us on, ‘Oh we’re an isolated incident,’” said Craig. “This happens all the time. This is not new and it’s going to continue. It happens from birth to death and everywhere in between.”

But the experience seems to have strengthened their relationship.

“When I looked at him on the supreme court steps,” said Craig of Mullins, “I realized and I said, ‘Hey, I actually love you twice as much as I thought I did.’ And we did a little head bump.”

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