So, what’s the difference between the Kennedy Center and a wedding cake? The First Amendment rights of wedding cake decorators are more secure than those of the center’s performing artists.
Let me explain.
In the same week President Donald Trump announced the commissioning of a new class of battleships named for himself — a ludicrous proposition given that these kinds of warships are obsolete after decades of technology shifts — Trump also renamed The John F. Kennedy for the Performing Arts Center by adding his own name to the American cultural icon.
Mara Richards Bim
Now, the institution created by Congress after President Kennedy’s assassination is, according to Trump’s hand-picked board, The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This narcissistic stunt is just the latest twist in the ongoing saga of the president’s fascist takeover of the Kennedy Center and of the arts and culture sector more broadly.
In response, the musician Chuck Redd canceled his annual Christmas Eve performance — the center’s Christmas Jazz Jam Redd has spearheaded since 2006.
Now, the Kennedy Center is threatening to sue Redd for $1 million. In a statement on the issue, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said, “Any artist cancelling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn’t courageous or principled — they are selfish, intolerant and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people.”
What is most illuminating about Daravi’s statement is that it stands in direct opposition to the 2018 Supreme Court decision in support of a wedding cake maker. I’m referring, of course, to the decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in which the court ruled baker Jack Phillips could not be forced to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because it violated both his freedom of speech and his free exercise of religion.
“In the court’s view, to force artists to perform their artistry in the service of something they are opposed to is a violation of their free speech.”
Phillips’ lawsuit argued, in part, that as an artist, to force him to use his artistic talents to endorse something he was opposed to (in this case, same-sex marriage) was a violation of his free speech. The court’s opinion takes great pains to parse out the artistry involved in creating a wedding cake and the inherent political and religious endorsement this kind of artistic expression would convey to the wider world. In the court’s view, to force artists to perform their artistry in the service of something they are opposed to is a violation of their free speech and, in the case of Phillips, also the free exercise of his religion.
The political Right — particularly those who trumpet Christian supremacy — framed the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s attempts to force Phillips and his public-facing business to serve all people without discrimination as the real discrimination. They heralded the ruling and saw it as the Supreme Court standing up to the cultural elites who impose their views on the masses.
It’s ironic, then, to see those same champions of a baker’s free speech calling for Chuck Redd and any other artists who refuse to have their artistic skills coopted to endorse something they are opposed to as “selfish, intolerant and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people.”
If those on the Right get their way, freedom of speech soon will be guaranteed only for those who say what the president and his administration want to hear.
Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as the first Justice and Advocacy Fellow at Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas where she recently was ordained to the gospel ministry. She earned the master of divinity degree and a certificate in spiritual direction from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company, which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.