Anti-LGBT baker to Supreme Court: "I want to have my cake and keep them from eating it."

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: So that begs the question, when have we ever given protection to a food? The primary purpose of a food of any kind is to be eaten...

...Now, some people might love the aesthetic appeal of a special desert, and look at it for a very long time, but in the end its only purpose is to be eaten.

And the same with many of the things that you've mentioned. A hairdo is to show off the person, not the artist. 

When people at a wedding look at a wedding cake and they see words, as one of the amici here, the pastry chef said, there was a gentleman who had upset his wife and written some words that said "I'm sorry for what I did," something comparable, and the chef was asked, the cake maker was asked, was that affiliated with you?

And she said no. It's affiliated with the person who shows the cake at their wedding.

It's what they wish to show.

So how is this your client's expression, and how can we find something whose predominant purpose is virtually always to be eaten? Call it a medium for expressive expression. 

Mind you, I can see if they've -­ create a cake and put it in a museum as an example of some work of art, that might be different because the circumstances would show that they want this to be affiliated with themselves. But explain how that becomes expressive speech, that medium becomes expressive speech.

The Masterpiece Cake Shop case- in which American Christianists have pivoted from "We hate the gays" to "Religious freedom lets me discriminate any way I say the Jesus voice in my head says to."

Justice Sotomayor's comments are from the transcript of today's oral argument before the Supreme Court. Today the *resident's Justice Department sided with those seeking legal permission to dig out the old signs and hang them out again, another #MAGA promise kept.

This is the first of a string of cases in which conservatives, having lost their decades-long argument that nothing should ever be done for the first time, concede that same-sex couples can marry. They just want to strip out the rights that attend marriage, leaving LGBT Americans in relationships as legally vacuous as those they had before Obergefell.

The transcript is a fascinating read. It's pretty much all accessible to readers with no legal trainin and shows the justices trying to figure out how to come up with a decision that works in the real world.

Three years ago, I laid out some initial thoughts on the case the court heard today.