Taken together, those three examples amount to very little. In that case, the court found religious animus based on three pieces of flimsy evidence: First, it noted that in public hearings on the bakery’s discrimination, one of the seven Colorado civil rights commissioners said that “it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to - to use their religion to hurt others.” The court also cited another commissioner’s statement that the bakery’s owner can believe “what he wants to believe,” but he can’t act on that belief “if he decides to do business in the state” - a statement that even the majority opinion conceded was “susceptible of different interpretations.” Finally, the court saw evidence of religious hostility in the state commission’s refusals to pursue complaints against three other bakeries that had declined to make cakes with anti-gay messages.
In Masterpiece, the court ruled in favor of a Christian-owned bakery in Colorado that had refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple on the same terms as all other customers. The Muslim ban decision comes only weeks after the Supreme Court, in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, bent over backwards to find religious hostility, despite a much weaker factual record. As a result, the ban will continue to upend people’s lives, tear apart families, and send a disgraceful message that Muslims are not welcome here.
In upholding the latest version of the ban, the court effectively ignored the overwhelming evidence of unmistakable anti-Muslim bias underlying the policy, crediting superficial changes the president made in response to court rulings that blocked earlier versions of the ban.
The short and stormy history of the policy is, by now, well known: On the heels of Trump’s central campaign promise of a “ total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration, he issued a series of travel bans, using territory as a proxy for religion and imposing severe, indefinite entry restrictions on individuals from certain Muslim-majority countries.
In the face of Trump’s repeated, unambiguous statements condemning Islam and Muslims, the Supreme Court essentially gave the president a free pass to vilify an entire faith and enshrine that bigotry into national immigration policy. In a deeply divided 5-4 decision handed down on Tuesday, the court upheld President Trump’s Muslim ban, allowing the federal government to target Muslims worldwide based on unfounded fears and bare religious animus. Hawaii, the Muslim ban case - send troubling mixed messages, which threaten to undermine religious freedom, fairness, and equality for all. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and Trump v. The wildly divergent results in those two high-profile cases - Masterpiece Cakeshop v. In a pair of religious freedom rulings this month, the Supreme Court took dramatically different approaches to a basic constitutional question: When does anti-religious hostility by government officials violate the religious liberty guarantees of the First Amendment?