After the Masterpiece cake shop victory in the Supreme Court, things looked prettystraightforward. We had a clear cut case of demonstrable bias, which was more thansufficient to find that the Colorado civil rights commission had no business judging thisparticular case. This means that when a government agency can be shown not to be animpartial adjudicator, it loses all legal standing with regard to any case that involves suchelements towards which it has bias.

This would mean that businesses are effectively free to say no to people who wish to forcethem to do things, provided they can demonstrate bias. Seeing as it is leftists who wish toforce people to comply with their will, finding bias is remarkably easy, as a leftist issomeone who by definition cannot help himself. Further, it is possible to bring a reversedscenario to the commission, allow their biases to run rampant, and then use thecommission’s behavior as proof of bias.

However, the court did not rule on freedom of association itself, on whether or notbusinesses could be forced to violate their religious beliefs in the name of tolerance per se.This leaves the door open to the possibility that an intelligent tyrant ruling on thecommission, or a skilled politician sitting in office, can use his position to force you to betolerant towards all of his chosen classes, by avoiding appearances of bias.

So, this leaves us in a position where the question is still open, and another case will likelydecide on the matter.

However, many writers and newspapers are out there saying that the case is confusing andthat now business owners are in a worse position than before. How, they can’t really say,except that now there is a conflict between civil rights laws and the court order. This is notso. There would be a conflict if the court order invalidated the existence of civil rights laws

on anything other than constitutional grounds. But this didn’t happen, as the court didn’tinvalidate the laws at all, except to say that they must be applied by a neutral arbiter.

In the event that a future ruling invalidates the civil rights laws on constitutional grounds,that again would not be confusing as it would simply throw the law out.

The only confusing scenario would be if the court found that freedom of association was anon-constitutionally guaranteed right, and that it overrode civil rights laws. This will nothappen, as freedom of association can only override laws if it is a constitutionallyguaranteed right.

So there is no confusion whatsoever, except in the minds of leftists who think that the lawchanges depending on who is being tried.