Cake war

Quote of the week: “A three-tiered, plain white cake with no writing, engravings, adornments, symbols or images is not pure speech.”

Could it be impure speech?

I don’t know but I was impressed by the list of lawyers and amici that appeared the other day in a California Court of Appeal ruling in yet another homophobic baker case.

Among the players: the state attorney general, the ACLU, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the LAMBDA Legal Defense and Education Fund, GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area; The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and The Catholic University, Columbus School of Law, Religious Liberty Clinic.

The lawsuit was filed by California’s Civil Rights Department in 2018. A lot of work, time and money went into this plain white litigation!

Why is cake so hard to find?!!?

Could a plain white cake be found nowhere else? (The answer is no — the ruling notes that the plaintiffs got a cake with the same non-design elsewhere.)

Did the couple have to mention it was a gay wedding when ordering a plain white cake from a homophobic baker?

Did the homophobic baker think she’d be struck by lightning if a cake got into the wrong hands? Does she check the bedroom habits of anyone who seeks baked goods?

You just know some undercover gay couples got cakes from the defendant bakery. The baker is definitely going to hell.

Actually, you can get the answers to most of these questions in the full (74-page!) ruling. I won’t spoil all of it for you but here are a couple of highlights:

The baker requires a consultation with the ordering couple and provides a “packet” that “includes various Bible verses and talks about how marriage is between a man and woman.”

But the devil (or the devil’s food) finds its way in — “four of Trastrie’s former employees had surreptitiously supplied wedding cakes on prior occasions to at least two same-sex couples without (defendant’s) knowledge.”

And my favorite completely unnecessary detail: The replacement cake “was placed in the center of the reception venue for a few minutes when it was cut during the event.”

Cakes are fleeting but litigation can last forever.

Monster law. I love it when a lawsuit presents an interesting philosophical question. Here’s one from a suit filed in Minnesota this month on behalf of the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus: Is Frankenstein’s monster one being or many?

I would have thought there is only one monster — a whole greater than the sum of its parts — but the caucus (or least its imaginative lawyers) seems to think otherwise.

No, the lawsuit isn’t about Frankenstein. It is about a 1,400-page law passed by the Minnesota Legislature that “ignored the clear directive of the Minnesota Constitution and logrolled dozens of unrelated provisions into the same Frankenstein’s monster of an omnibus tax bill.”

The state constitution, the suit noted, requires laws to have a single subject expressed in a title.

Doesn’t the monster need all his parts to work? If the state law is the same as the monster, then it’s a single subject. Right? The monster subject is “law.”

Similes can be tricky.

The “Jumbo Omnibus Bill” (which maybe should have been compared to an elephant) includes regulations covering employee classification, broadband, vet technicians, taxes, electric bikes, farmers markets and combat sports. And everything in between. It’s impressive.

“But most concerning to the plaintiff, in addition to all of these subjects, the Jumbo Omnibus Bill also includes Article 36, which adds binary triggers to the class of ‘trigger activators’ prohibited for private ownership and makes merely owning or possessing one — even if it’s not installed in a gun — a felony crime.”

Leave it to a gun group to find that needle in a haystack.

By the way, why would you have a trigger activator if it isn’t installed in a gun? Squirt gun use?

Anyway, Frankenstein’s monster is definitely the wrong analogy. I would have gone with Leftover Hotdish. Look it up — it’s a Minnesota staple.