So.just to rephrase to see if I am understanding you correctly: If it is already on the shelf, then one does not have the right to refuse, but if it is to be made specifically to order, then one does have that right. Is that correct?
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this is how i am semi reading it even though the justices didn't fully come out and say it but some of them did.
there were severeal stand out issues that the majority wrote on:
But the critical question of when and how Phillips’ right to exercise his religion can be limited had to be determined, Kennedy emphasized, in a proceeding that was not tainted by hostility to religion. Here, Kennedy observed, the “neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised”
Kennedy admonished, “is inappropriate for a Commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law—a law that protects discrimination on the basis of religion as well as sexual orientation.” Moreover, Kennedy added, the commission’s treatment of Phillips’ religious objections was at odds with its rulings in the cases of bakers who refused to create cakes “with images that conveyed disapproval of same-sex marriage.”
Here, Kennedy wrote, Phillips “was entitled to a neutral decisionmaker who would give full and fair consideration to his religious objection as he sought to assert it in all of the circumstances in which this case was presented, considered, and decided.” Because he did not have such a proceeding, the court concluded, the commission’s order – which, among other things, required Phillips to sell same-sex couples wedding cakes or anything else that he would sell to opposite-sex couples and mandated remedial training and compliance reports – “must be set aside.”
n his view, the different bakers’ cases – refusing to make cakes for a same-sex marriage and refusing to make cakes disparaging same-sex marriage – were, from a legal perspective, similar, and the commission was wrong to treat them differently just because it regarded Phillips’ beliefs as “offensive.” Using strong language, Gorsuch emphasized that, in the United States, “the place of secular officials isn’t to sit in judgment of religious beliefs, but only to protect their free exercise. Just as it is the ‘proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence’ that we protect speech that we hate, it must be the proudest boast of our free exercise jurisprudence that we protect religious beliefs that we find offensive.”
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately, in an opinion joined by Gorsuch, to address an issue that the court did not decide: whether an order mandating that Phillips bake cakes for same-sex weddings violates his right to free speech. In Thomas’ view, Phillips’ creation of custom wedding cakes is exactly the kind of “expressive” conduct protected by the First Amendment. Requiring Phillips to make such cakes for same-sex marriage, even when it will convey a message that “he believes his faith forbids,” violates his First Amendment rights.
Thomas’ discussion of Phillips’ free-speech claim seemed to acknowledge this, with his observation that, “in future cases, the freedom of speech could be essential to preventing” the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, from being used to “portray everyone who does not” agree with that ruling “as bigoted and unentitled to express a different view.”
