“The difference here is that the cake in question is not yet baked. The State is not petitioning the court to order defendants to sell a cake,” Lampe wrote. “The State asks this court to compel Miller to use her talents to design and create a cake she has not yet conceived with the knowledge that her work will be displayed in celebration of a marital union her religion forbids.”

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (BP) — A California trial court has upheld a Christian baker’s right to refuse to create a wedding cake for a lesbian couple, but the decision comes as a similar case is already pending in the nation’s highest court.

Standing to set a legal precedent is the case of Colorado baker and Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, deliberated before the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2017. A ruling is expected within months in Phillips’ fight to limit his creativity as a wedding cake baker to marriages between a man and a woman.Tastries Bakery owner Cathy Miller’s freedom of speech “outweighs” the state of California’s interest in ensuring a freely accessible marketplace, Judge David R. Lampe said in his decision in the Superior Court of California in Kern County, one of the state’s 58 trial courts.

In California, Southern Baptist pastor Roger Spradlin was among about 200 of Miller’s supporters who attended a Feb. 2 Bakersfield prayer rally in advance of Lampe’s decision.

“She declined to design a wedding cake for a lesbian couple’s wedding, not because she is not loving or compassionate,” Spradlin told Baptist Press today (Feb. 6), “but because of her own religious and biblical convictions that marriage was designed by God between one man and one woman.”

Spradlin urges continued prayer on behalf of Miller, a longtime member at his pastorate, Valley Baptist Church in Bakersfield.

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