The California’s Civil Rights Department is sanctioning Cathy Miller, of Bakersfield, California, for refusing to bake a cake for a couple formed by two women.
By Catholics for Catholics
To bake or not to bake.
That is the question for a California baker who is requesting the Supreme Court to hear her challenge to a state law that would compel her to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples in encroachment of her Christian faith.
Baker Cathy Miller, of Bakersfield, is challenging the California’s Civil Rights Department, which is looking to sanction her for declining to form a wedding cake celebrating a same-sex union, according to The Washington Times.
Miller’s case is the second cake-creating quarrel to reach the high court in recent years. In 2018, the judges ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who was chastised by Colorado Civil Rights Commission for saying no to baking a same-sex wedding cake because of his faith.
“If she does not agree to design and create cakes for same-sex wedding ceremonies despite her undisputedly sincere religious objections, California says she must give up her cake-design business altogether. Miller must bake the cakes or give up her livelihood,” Miller’s lawyers said Tuesday in their petition to the high court.
“California’s eight-year civil prosecution of Miller violates both the Free Speech Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. The Bill of Rights does not leave ‘it open to public authorities to compel [Ms. Miller] to utter what is not in [her] mind.’ […] And because designing and creating one of the most well-known and universal of all wedding symbols involves both Miller’s speech and her religion, both Clauses are implicated,” the petition states.
Cathy Miller, a devout Christian baker, asked the Supreme Court to protect her right to create custom-designed wedding cakes aligned with her faith. After nearly a decade of California punishing Cathy’s religious beliefs about marriage, it’s time for the Supreme Court to let… pic.twitter.com/HRrpNu7Gl8
— BECKET (@becketfund) August 27, 2025
For Miller, her legal trouble started when two women arrived at her shop in 2017, asking her to make a cake to celebrate their wedding. The women wanted to wed prior to President Donald Trump taking office, being afraid they would not be able to do so after that.
But The Washington Times reported that Miller’s trial court ruled in her favor in 2023, thinking that she did not discriminate against LGBTQ people by hiring or business customs. But she lost the appeal of that ruling, with the appellate court saying the First Amendment did not protect her denial to make custom wedding cakes for LGBTQ clients.
The California Supreme Court refused to hear her appeal, prompting her to ask the justices to weigh in. The case is Catherine Miller v. Civil Rights Department. It would take four justices to vote in favor of hearing the dispute for oral arguments to be granted.
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