THE REALITY PRINCIPLE.

• Author: Sager, Lawrence G.

INTRODUCTION

Many liberals have received the Supreme Court's decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (1) as narrow and regrettable. (2) On this view, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy sought to escape a conflict between two of his paramount commitments, to religious freedom and to equal citizenship for LGBTQ people, by writing a majority opinion that was specific to the peculiar facts in Colorado and therefore limited in its precedential effect. But this reading overlooks aspects of the Court's ruling that may well be consequential. Some of these are salutary, while others are more troubling.

On the one hand, Masterpiece established several broad principles that can work to promote full and equal citizenship for all Americans in future cases. Now is the moment to underscore these aspects of the decision, because additional cases pitting religious freedom against equality law are percolating in lower courts. In fact, Masterpiece Cakeshop itself is already back in litigation after it turned away a customer who requested a cake to celebrate a gender transition. (3) Before long, a Court without Justice Kennedy will face such critical questions again, and under social circumstances that will be equally or even more intense. By the time it does, the salutary lessons of Masterpiece must have been learned.

On the other hand, there is an interpretation of the majority opinion that should be strenuously resisted. Several passages of Justice Kennedy's opinion could be read to suggest that the basic structure of Colorado's civil rights law, as enforced by state officials and judges, was unconstitutionally hostile to religion. That proposition is both wrong and dangerous, but it is already being promoted by scholars and activists in the aftermath of the decision, including in the new Masterpiece litigation. (4)

In this Article, we address both the promising and the problematic aspects of the opinion. In Part I, we identify three constitutional principles that were established or reaffirmed in Masterpiece: that there is no constitutional right to religious exemptions from neutral and generally applicable public accommodations laws; that the government's interest in avoiding dignitary harm is sufficient to defeat most claims for religious exemptions; and that courts should be sensitive to evidence of government animus against vulnerable groups. In the course of that analysis, we emphasize the Court's recognition that for these purposes sexual orientation discrimination and racial discrimination are structurally parallel.

In Part II, we turn to the mistaken interpretation of the Court's opinion that worries us. At points, Kennedy's language has been read to suggest that Colorado's civil rights practices violate the state's obligation of neutrality toward religion. Colorado's law protects gay couples and religious believers alike from discrimination in the marketplace, of course. And the state allows any baker--including religious objectors to gay marriage--to refuse to write messages with which they disagree on their cakes, including messages that affirm marriage equality. Yet some are arguing that these commonplace civil rights practices are somehow biased against religion. If Justice Kennedy really did mean to imply that Colorado's administration of antidiscrimination law contains a constitutional flaw, then he was deeply mistaken, and mistaken in a way that poses serious danger for the protection of equal rights in the United States. We explain why, drawing on an analysis provided by Charles Black during the civil rights era. (5)

Black thought that critics of Brown v. Board of Education (6) had ignored the unduckable social import of racial segregation. Applying a "reality principle,' Black made legally relevant the social fact that segregation worked to perpetuate white supremacy. We argue that similar attention to the social structure of antidiscrimination laws excludes the errant interpretation of Masterpiece. Colorado's enforcement of its public accommodations law rightly protected groups that were subject to structural injustice, including both religious denominations themselves and the LGBTQ community, and its actions should not signal any hostility toward religion.

Today, many religious conservatives feel beleaguered--they see themselves as the subjects of an overweening and overconfident liberal orthodoxy that seeks to stamp out their way of life. They contend that liberalism has become illiberal; that it enforces a cruel and ironic form of conformity. We deeply respect the sincerity and importance of religious convictions to many. Moreover, we understand that some religious faiths have been subject to systematic discrimination. Not only our scholarship, but our personal experience testifies to that truth.

Civil rights law in Colorado--and in every other jurisdiction of which we are aware--protects religious believers against discrimination based on their beliefs. What it does not do is give religiously-motivated persons a blanket exemption from public accomodations laws to which they object. The central aim of civil rights law is to protect members of vulnerable groups from the harms of structural injustice; that vital project would be undermined by a broad carve out for religious dissent. Antidiscrimination law does not take sides in a purported culture war, nor does it violate the liberal and democratic commitment to government neutrality among comprehensive conceptions. To the contrary, it stipulates what citizens who are divided on questions of profound importance nonetheless owe to each other in order to live together as equals in our political community.

I.

The Masterpiece Court embraced three broad themes that provide guidance for the resolution of future conflicts between religious freedom and antidiscrimination law, not only in pending cases concerning wedding vendors but across constitutional doctrine.

First, the Court reaffirmed that religious actors are not constitutionally entitled to exemptions from public accommodations laws under normal circumstances. These laws, which protect members of vulnerable groups against discrimination by those who choose to provide goods and services to the public, are too important to equal citizenship to allow for exemptions based on conscience. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion treated this doctrine as constitutional bedrock: "it is a general rule that [religious and philosophical] objections do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law." (7)

Including the votes of the two dissenters, who expressly embraced this part the Court's opinion, (8) all nine justices thus endorsed the application of the rule of Employment Division v. Smith to typical public accommodations laws. (9) This matters because prominent scholars and lawyers had argued during the litigation that the Court should abandon the rule of Smith at least with respect to Colorado's enforcement of its public accommodations law and perhaps more generally. (10) We will address the neutrality of the Colorado law in Part II--for now, we simply notice the Court's reaffirmation of Smith in the context of equality guarantees.

Note here that the Court declined the invitation of advocates to distinguish between discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and discrimination on the basis of race. Conservatives had been urging judges to find that religious exemptions from laws protecting LGBTQ citizens were more acceptable than they were from laws protecting racial minorities. As others have explained more fully, the Court instead assimilated LGBTQ rights to the model of racial equality and to the paradigm of full and equal citizenship for everyone. (11) Justice Kennedy prominently cited Piggie Park, the leading precedent for the proposition that a religious commitment to segregation cannot justify a free exercise exemption from a public accommodations law. (12) That citation was important--it should permanently end the argument that the structural injustice experienced by LGBTQ customers is somehow less worthy of concern or more vulnerable to dissent than racial subordination.

Second, Justice Kennedy recognized that the government's interest in avoiding dignitary harm is sufficient to support the application of its antidiscrimination law, even without more tangible economic harm. Whether avoiding stigmatic harm was enough to justify application of the public accommodations law was at issue because Charlie Craig and David Mullins were able to find another wedding cake without significant economic loss. (13) Yet Kennedy explained that invidious discrimination in the marketplace imposes a more profound harm than increased search costs. If equality laws were subject to unconstrained exceptions on grounds of religion or morality, he said, the result could be widespread refusals of service that would radiate "community-wide stigma inconsistent with the history and dynamics of civil rights laws." (14) Frequent religious and moral exemptions to public accommodations laws would relegate vulnerable groups to a subordinate social status.

Here too, advocates had been pushing the Court in the other direction. Lawyers and scholars had long argued that "dignitary" or "stigmatic" injury to same-sex couples should not count as harm at all, or at least not a harm that was sufficiently serious to override religious freedom. (15) On this view, only feelings of self-worth could be at stake, and LGBTQ citizens should be sufficiently resilient to resist such intangible injuries. Government should not work to shield citizens from "mere offense." In Masterpiece, however, the Court rejected that view, holding that the systematic subordination of groups is an alarming and objective social wrong, not merely an injury to the feelings of the...