Marital Cakes and Conscientious Promises
| Author | G. P. Marcar |
| Position | Is the Harold Turner Research Fellow at the Centre for Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago |
| Pages | 201-215 |
The U.S. Supreme Court has recently been tasked with determining—both
metaphorically and literally—whether in matters of marriage equality and religious
freedom, those within society can have their cake and eat it too. This came to the
fore in Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018). In most of scholarship which has followed, the
respective parties’ rights in this case are parsed in terms of rights to religious expression
and free speech (on the one hand), and a statutory right to non-discrimination (on
the other). By approaching this matter through a primarily philosophical (rather
than legal) lens, I aim to present a new perspective. Where cases involve same-sex
marriage, it is argued that both sides are predicated upon religious or conscientious
convictions. This is established through a philosophical argument, which examines
the nature of the marital promise to love and seeks to demonstrate how this promise
entails a characteristically religious sort of belief.
KEYWORDS
Masterpiece Cakeshop, Religious Freedom, Marital Love Promises, Conscientious
Beliefs, Moral Anthropology
© 2021 G. P. Marcar, published by Sciendo.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
A.The Discrimination Claim: A Question of Cakes .........................
B.Justice Gorsuch and the Importance of Religious Freedom ........
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A. The Promise to Love Another ......................................................
B. The Promise to Love Another
C. The Promise to Love Another, Forever: An Intrinsically Religious
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