To bake or not to bake? That was the question posed by a same-gender wedding cake case in California.
Last year, Cathy Miller, the owner of Tastries Bakery in Bakersfield, refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. The couple, wanting to be treated as human beings and all, took issue with that. They took Miller to court.
On Feb. 6, 2018, however, Kern County Supreme Court Judge David Lampe ruled on a preliminary injunction that because the couple's proposed cake had yet to be baked, Miller's artistic expression was protected by the First Amendment.
That is:Her Christian faith protected her from having to bake a cake for an LGBTQ couple. Had the cake already been prepared and on display to the public, the judge noted, Miller would have had to sell them the cake.
Makes sense, right? Not to Jimmy Kimmel.
Despite admitting the judge's ruling "sounded reasonable at first," the "Jimmy Kimmel Live" host hilariously blasted Lampe's decision using an ordinary dining experience to make his case.
Check out the sketch (story continues below):
In the sketch, Kimmel, playing a server, rules out menu items for guests at his table based on the various attitudes of those preparing the food.
"Does anyone have any food allergies? Any dietary restrictions?" Kimmel asks, as the guests shake their heads. "Are any of you gay?"
"I'm gay," one woman responds.
"OK. You won't be enjoying any of our signature salads tonight," Kimmel says, to laughs. "Our salad chef today is Tony, and he believes homosexuality is a sin, so he won't be creating any of our salads for you."
From a legal perspective, there’s an important difference between simply selling a cake to the general public and creating one for a specific wedding event, the judge argued.
But isn’t that a murky distinction? What’s stopping Tony from deeming his salad a work of art expressing his support for a gay guest at the restaurant?
If Tony's salad had been pre-made, however, that'd apparently suffice.
[rebelmouse-image 19529270 dam="1" original_size="500x254" caption="GIF via "Jimmy Kimmel Live"/YouTube." expand=1]GIF via "Jimmy Kimmel Live"/YouTube.
"I don't want day-old salad," the guest protests.
To which Kimmel retorts, "Well, aren't you a picky lesbian."
That's not the end of it, though. A Jewish guest is denied lasagna because the cook preparing it is antisemitic. Another guest can't order steak because a chef is Hindu.
When a man orders a salad, intending to give it to the lesbian couple and circumvent the discriminatory rule, Kimmel's character shuts him down. "Our owner Patricia is a Wiccan priestess," he explains, "and she won't allow men to order for women. She says it perpetuates the patriarchy."
When can one person's religious liberty veer off into blatant discrimination? As Kimmel's sketch suggests, pretty darn quickly.