"The Cake" is a Lie

The Supreme Court has been deciding all sorts of stuff lately. Stuff about unions, about domestic violence, about voting rights. I’ll be honest - I’ve read the headlines but not the articles. (I’m saving them for when it feels right. You don’t want to force these things.) 

‘Tis the season, I guess. After all, it was June when they ruled on Obergefell v. Hodges, effectively making same-sex marriage legal nationwide. (I remember it clearly; it’s one of those strange “where-were-you-when” flashbulb memories for me, even though the ruling has absolutely no bearing on my personal life. I was on a public bus on my way to Rochester, New Hampshire to pick up my car, which had just had its windshield replaced after several months of procrastination - mine, not the car's - when I happened to see the news.)

So without actually looking into it, I feel like I can say with some confidence that June is the Month of Supreme Court Decisions. But since June is also the End of the School Year and The Weather Finally Not Being Total Crap Month, it can be a bit hard to keep up with what RBG and her crew have been up to. (Despite not being the Chief Justice, RBG is undeniably the leader of the gang in public perception. I think this is largely due to the pleasant rhythm of her name: “Ruth Bader Ginsburg” is just fun to say in a way that “Samuel Alito” is not. Nevermind “Sonia Sotomayor,” whose name is actively un-fun to pronounce, especially for liberal white people who are terrified of both under and overemphasizing its Spanish elements.)

But there is one recent decision that I have paid some attention to. In fact, I’ve been anticipating it for months, the way that normal people might look forward to the next Star Wars movie. This is the sequel to that 2015 blockbuster, Obergefell v. Hodges. The one about whether it’s lawful for a baker to refuse to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding, whether that counts as discrimination or not.

You know exactly why this is here.

And as this article points out, this sequel, like so many others, has been rather disappointing. Instead of considering the larger implications of the case and setting a precedent, the Supreme Court made a decision in Masterpiece v. Colorado that really only applies to this one particular bakery, this one particular cake, and this one particular wedding. Which is a shame, because I think this case touches on some very important philosophical questions.

Now, I know many people think this case is about religious freedom and/or civil rights. But it’s not. It’s about questions much deeper and more fundamental than that.

For instance: is there such thing as a “gay cake?”

That is: is “being-for-a-gay-wedding” a property that a cake can have?

Put in more general terms: are human intentions for objects somehow embedded in those objects?

One step further: is there such thing as objective reality, or is it all just perception?

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Our guiding principle right now is that a business can deny someone service because of something about the product he or she requests, but not because of something about the customer. (Or not because of certain traits, anyway. You can deny someone service because you don’t like their shirt, but not because of their race, which, though well-intentioned, seems a bit silly to me. Certainly it's a great way to get a whole bunch of racists to rebrand themselves as shirt-haters.) So the baker made the point that he wasn’t discriminating against the customers for being gay; he would have refused to sell a “gay cake” to a straight person as well. Neil Gorsuch concurred.

Perfectly legal to discriminate against this guy.

But to most of us, the idea of a “gay cake” sounds absurd. We are inclined to dismiss the baker's argument, to say that a cake is not "tainted" by its future association with a same-sex wedding any more than a particular gun is defined by the fact that it will be one day used to commit a crime (see: why The Right hates the term “assault weapon.”) An object having a destiny is just mystical, fantasy-book nonsense. 

We want to say what Sigmund Freud almost definitely would not: “sometimes a cake is just a cake.”

But cakes are not born; they are made.

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As it happens, I recently ordered a cake. In fact, the very next thing on my to-do list for the evening is to go pick up said cake. This cake is for the eighth-grade graduation at my school, a fact that I was compelled to divulge to the woman at the grocery store when I placed the order. And now that she knows the cake’s future, she cannot help but see the cake as an “eighth-grade graduation cake.” It can no longer be “just a cake” in her experience of it.

Of course, I could have ordered the cake without explicitly telling her what it was for, and so could anyone who wants a cake for a same-sex wedding. But there will always be clues. Some are pretty obvious: in my case, the words “Congratulations 8th Graders” are going to be written on the cake in green icing, along with a graduation cap and balloons. (Picture two miniature plastic grooms, or a photo of the couple, or the words “Happy Wedding Day Steve and Adam.") Others are more subtle: in my small town, everyone knows (or could find out pretty easily) that I work at the school, so the fact that I was the one who ordered the cake could be used to infer its purpose. (A same-sex couple walking into the bakery holding hands; stereotypes about lisps or clothes that fit.) Sometimes these assumptions might be mistaken - as when I order a large pizza and employees assume that I am going to share it with at least one other person - but they are always present.

Picture Steve Harvey as "Steve"
just because he would hate it.

A gay couple trying desperately to keep a homophobic baker from finding out that the cake they’re ordering is for their wedding would make a decent plot for a sitcom episode (or a mid-tier Adam Sandler movie, a sort of reverse Chuck and Larry, which I’ve never seen.) For all I know already is one. And in that episode, you just know that the baker would find out the truth at some point. And when he did, that knowledge would undeniably affect the way he saw the cake. Perhaps we could argue that it shouldn’t stop him from making or selling the cake (for one thing, it seems like a poor business decision) but that’s a different question. What’s undeniable is that his way of perceiving the cake is altered irrevocably.

Because there’s no such thing as “just a cake.” We always imagine objects as having some purpose, some use, some connection to a human being, whether that is ourselves or others. That’s how we make sense of them. The only way we can make sense of them. Before the sitcom-baker knew the cake was for a gay wedding, he saw it as a cake for a straight wedding or a bar mitzvah or a birthday party or whatever. Since cakes are made-to-order, it’s not really possible to distinguish between what is part of the cake and what is part of the customer. All we can ever actually access is our experience of the cake.

And it goes further than this. Even if you work on an assembly line, churning out identical cake after cake, you would still see them as something other than “just a cake.” You may see them as a means to earn your paycheck, a symbol of the gluttony and excess of American culture, an item that will bring joy to countless people around the world, etc.. This would all depend on your attitudes and feelings about not just cake, but also things like capitalism, Henry Ford, your childhood, children in general, and frosting. (My own feelings on these topics, in order: for, mixed, against, for, mostly for, and mostly against.) But a cake is never just a cake.

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So what does this mean for Masterpiece v. Colorado? Weirdly, I think it means that the baker was kind of right. (Which, even more weirdly to me, also makes Neil Gorsuch kind of right). It was a “gay cake” to him. The distinction between attributes of the product and attributes of the customer breaks down when you consider it phenomenologically, when you consider the way that humans actually experience things. It’s text and context, basically. You don’t read a book, watch a movie, or listen to a song in a vacuum; your experience is always colored by your pre-existing ideas, biases, associations, and memories. As uncomfortable as it is to think about, there's no such thing as perceiving something "the way it actually is." 

The same-sex couple was also right, though. The baker was being discriminatory. But there's another uncomfortable truth we have to consider here: a Supreme Court decision isn’t going to end discrimination. It’s only going to make the forms of that discrimination subtler and more insidious. Look at what happened after Brown v. Board of Education. Schools desegregated reluctantly, then resegregated quietly. What we really need are people who don’t mind making a "gay cake." People who don't have any desire to turn away customers who are gay, or black, or even those who wear Ed Hardy shirts. People who genuinely value diversity. And there are no shortcuts to that.

Another point: I wouldn't want a cake that the baker only made for me because he was legally required to. His resentment would be baked right in.