Last week’s New York Times piece by Jennifer Finney Boylan, “The Masterpiece Cakeshop Case Is Not About Religious Freedom,” floored me with the number of distortions it crowded into a few paragraphs.  I can only conclude that the left’s discourse and values have become so wayward and impoverished that they would rather criminalize creativity than take on the serious issues the Supreme Court will be hearing on December 5.

Boylan begins with a dark narrative about the pharmacy Boylan frequents, “run by a conservative Republican.”  (Is there any other kind?)  Will he refuse to fill the demanded prescription, Boylan quails, “given my condition”?  What condition is that? I wondered, as clearly each reader was meant to – compulsive self-dramatizing syndrome?

Thus begins Boylan’s parade of horribles.  If Phillips wins in his appeal from lower court decisions, sick babies will die, HIV patients will be turned away from treatment clinics, pre-Civil Rights abominations will become the order of the day.  Except none of these scenarios is backed up with citations from the court papers.  There’s a good reason for that.  They’re not in there.  But after all, what do facts matter when it comes to the left’s self-suffering legerdemain?

Does Colorado’s state public accommodations law as applied to Jack Phillips’s refusal to accept a commission for a cake for two men trying to marry each other regulate speech or conduct?  Under First Amendment law, the latter is permitted.  The former, with minimal exceptions, is not.

That is the threshold question. 

Phillips argues he was being forced to convey an unwanted message by providing a custom-made cake for Craig’s and Mullins’s ceremony.  One of the cases Phillips and the Justice Department as amicus rely on is the Supreme Court’s 1994 ruling in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc.  It held that a private sponsor, a veterans’ group, was not required to admit an LGBGT group to its St. Patrick’s Day parade because that would require the group to alter its message, which did not embrace approval of gay pride.  The same doomsday predictions we hear in advance of Tuesday’s oral argument were adumbrated there, too.  None of them came true.  But why learn from history? 

What about the actual case?  Disagreeing with Phillips’s characterization, Craig and Mullins and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (respondents) claim that CADA permissibly regulates conduct, not speech.  The targeted conduct is the provision of a good or service.  According to them, the nature of the good or service is irrelevant.  Phillips’s action is discriminatory, plain and simple.  His claim that CADA is unconstitutional as applied to him is just a pretext for his religion-inspired reactionary hatred.

Boylan echoes this reductionism, and then some.  But while Craig and Mullins are bound to the papers and what they actually say, Boylan is not.  Boylan singlehandedly reinterprets pages of argument and counter-argument analyzing CADA, discussing precedents, and building on agreed upon facts with magical revision: 

There are two important things to know about the religious freedom/wedding cake case.  One is that it’s not about religious freedom – it’s about religious exemption.  The other is that it’s about a whole lot more than wedding cakes.  

While CADA does in fact grant religious exemptions, that is not what Phillips is seeking.  As David French at National Review notes, it is the other way around.  Craig and Mullins are demanding an across-the-board application of Colorado’s public accommodations law that amounts to a state exemption from the First Amendment. 

But Boylan is right about Masterpiece being about a whole lot more than wedding cakes (as though the Supreme Court would grant certiorari to a case that didn’t have far-ranging implications).  The undisputed facts show that Phillips serves customers attracted to members of their own sex all the time.  He limits his rejection of their requests to cakes for ceremonies meant to be weddings.  In other words, Phillips maintains, and his actions corroborate, that he is selectively choosing not whom to serve, but what product to offer.  He bases this refusal on his religious beliefs in light of the nature of the specific product he produces – the demands it takes on his time; the drawdown it makes on his creative energies; and, perhaps most important, the dissonance that would result if he were forced to deploy his talents robotically in the name of dogma.  

The real question, therefore, is not whether Boylan can get estrogen at his pharmacy because he thinks he is a woman.  (We finally get let in on the secret of his condition!)  It is, in my view, not even about religion.  It is about preserving some anarchic sweet spot in our increasingly alienated, doctrinaire, one-size-fits-all society – a space devoted to whimsy, invention, and psychic independence.  That is what creativity requires.  Just ask the artists whom Stalin banished to Siberia and certain death for no worse crime than painting more like the American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning than Stalin’s stable of Soviet Realist lackeys.  When the government starts requiring creatives to perform in the service of the one true ideology, vision withers.

Not that any lockstep leftists nowadays would notice.  This is why the soulless Boylan can glibly misrepresent the question of whether Jack Phillips’s wedding cakes are “art.”  The entirety of the argument in Boylan’s seeming make-it-up-as-you-go discussion comes down to sleight-of-hand: Phillips can’t win on the issue of faith, so he defaults to calling his “nice-looking cakes” art.  That’s simply incorrect. 

The possible First Amendment implications of CADA are not at issue.  They have already been admitted by respondents, including the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.  Indeed, the commission declined to enforce CADA against bakers who refused to serve religious customers asking for a special-order wedding cake with words from Leviticus on it on just these grounds.  The unresolved question here is not whether the First Amendment may apply.  It is whether it does where there is no express written message – only an implied one. 

Technically, if the cakes are deemed “art” rather than “implied speech,” according to ample case law, their expressiveness is absolutely protected.  Art, unlike implied speech, doesn’t have to convey a “succinct and articulable” message.  It is “pure expression” and can simply be.  Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Hurley court used the express inarticulateness of Jackson Pollack’s abstract expressionist paintings as an example of this principle.  In any case, the point is, even if the cakes are not “art,” the constitutional challenge doesn’t go away.    

Even granting, moreover, that there is room to disagree over the artistic status of Phillips’s “masterpieces,” Boylan’s caution that “that argument demands that the court get into the business of defining art itself” is mind-boggling.  The courts are asked to decide on the nature of expression and its protectability literally all the time.  Can a tattoo parlor be singled out in a zoning law, or does it engage in protected speech?  Is a cropped copy of a Walker Evans photograph thievery or fair use (sanctioned by the First Amendment exception to copyright)?  How do you define obscenity?  Boylan’s idea that the Supreme Court shouldn’t be asked to distinguish between Phillips’s elaborately designed ritual object and, as Boylan puts it, a “well-manicured lawn” is so out of whack that even the respondents don’t venture it.

At the end of the article, Boylan acknowledges that his old-timey pharmacist never treated him with anything but “kindness and respect.”  It is almost as if he is disappointed that reality hasn’t lived up to his counter-factual histrionics.  Although this type of commentary is what we have come to expect from the Times, it is worth adding that it is cheap – dirt cheap.  Anybody at all who sees fit to suspend the facts can make a “slippery slope” argument.  Fortunately, we still live in a country where the supreme court of the land attends to more than horror-baiting.

The worst, and therefore most likely, outcome of the current rash of sexual misconduct accusations is that people will continue to think they are primarily about bodies, about who touched whose body, about who exposed his body when he shouldn’t have.  That most of us currently already assume that such incidents are mostly about bodies itself indicates our lack of vision.

Such interactions are really about souls – about the collective soul of our nation, and the sickness infecting it.

The disease afflicting our souls is liberalism, by which I mean not so much the policy positions of the Democrats, but all those cultural movements that have, in the modern era, conspired to liberate men and women from the strictures and formative influences of family, religion, tradition, and community.  Once we had thrown off these burdensome yokes, advocates of such changes promised, our lives would be free and unencumbered.  Instead, we now see that this revolution has led to an atmosphere of fear and decadence, where the only free and unencumbered thing is, allegedly, Matt Lauer’s penis.

The excesses of human misbehavior, we were told, could be curbed, if not eradicated, by a combination of education and legislation.  Sexual harassment seminars in the workplace combined with anti-discrimination laws would bring about a world where the age-old dynamics between powerful men and attractive women would evaporate like pheromones dispersed by the tender breeze.

The revelations of powerful men persisting in their scurrilous ways have exposed that lie.  Are we to believe that Louis C.K., for example, would have refrained from asking random women to watch him do disgusting acts if only he’d had an H.R. rep there to remind him that such behavior is wrong?  Indeed, that is exactly what we have been asked to believe until now: that telling people that forcing sexual conduct on the unwilling is “unprofessional” would somehow stop such things from happening.  What every human being knows, save members of Congress, corporate executives, and a few other comedians, apparently, is that human beings misbehave not because we lack knowledge, but because we lack love.

Because we lack love as individuals, the best of us once sought to build a culture that would encourage its development in the form of virtue.  It is precisely from the moral influence of that culture that we have been liberated.  Instead of virtue, we now have “careers.”

In all of the allegations so far, the notion of “career” as the ultimate source of meaning has been implicit.  Consider Gwyneth Paltrow’s allegations against Harvey Weinstein.  She did not come forward earlier, she said, because she feared that doing so would have hurt her career prospects.  For the sake of her career, she suffered whatever degradations Weinstein managed to inflict on her, and she allowed him and others in the industry to inflict even worse on other young women.  The idea underlying so many of these claims is that standing up to louche behavior puts at risk careers, and that careers are far too valuable to risk merely for the sake of doing the right thing.

We cannot blame Ms. Paltrow or any of the many other victims, though.  They were simply operating within the system of values they had been taught was normal.  They were operating within that scheme of liberation that we now see is its own sort of slavery.

To criticize our worship of “career” is not to say men and women ought to indulge in idleness or to refuse to cultivate industriousness.  But such virtues can be pursued in ways that do not place us so tightly in the liberal hold or leave us at the mercies of those whose appetites have, through indulgence, grown overpowering.

An example: I know a young woman who, as a teenager, started an online business.  By the end of high school, she had cultivated it to the point where she was able to open a brick-and-mortar store.  She has a secure income and a future.  Her most powerful coworker is her mother.  Her chances of being sexually harassed at work are, as you might imagine, slim.

This young woman’s efforts are entirely laudable, and she should be an example to others.  Work, even entrepreneurship, is not the problem.  The problem is “career” elevated to a source of spiritual meaning.  We cling to careers now, not only because they enrich us materially, but because, in our state of liberated poverty, they are all we have.

The answer to the problems that have come to light in recent weeks, we are told, is more education, more legislation, more shallow efforts to circumvent deep human nature.  In short, we are told that the solution to the problems liberalism causes is more liberalism.  This is always the way.  This prescription, we can be sure, will only worsen our malady.

The real and only cure for a sexually out-of-control culture is the cultivation of sexual self-control.  Only individuals, in pursuing the good, can heal societal moral sickness.  This does not mean that institutions play no role.  They do.  The role of our social institutions ought to be to reinforce and reinstitute the strictures that the bonds of faith, family, and virtue place on us.  When that happens, the number of such deplorable instances plummets.

But such medicine is repugnant to our body politic. It tastes bitter.  A society as deeply in the thrall of liberalism as ours finds itself is unable to consider ideas beyond that frame.  Thus does liberalism make all that truly leads to health seem noxious, everything that leads to life seem like steps backward toward decay.

And so, in the end, the steady flow of accusations will amount to little besides a bump in the ratings at The Today Show and grist for the gossip mill.  In a few weeks, audiences will tire of hearing about such things and will forget them.  Meanwhile, our culture will continue to weaken.  Our symptoms will only intensify.  And we, a sick and beleaguered people, blind to the causes of our pain, will deny ourselves the necessary treatment, darkening, ever more, our long-term prognosis.