They want to break him to send a message. But the Masterpiece Cakeshop owner is standing his ground.
They want to break him to send a message. But the Masterpiece Cakeshop owner is standing his ground.
J ack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., is back in court. At this rate, the poor man will probably be badgered to his grave.
Phillips earned his unwanted fame after an unelected gaggle of authoritarians at the Colorado Civil Rights Commission embarked on a six-year bigoted crusade to wreck his business after the baker refused to design a specialty cake for a gay-wedding ceremony in 2012.
It is perhaps irrelevant to those of us who believe in religious liberty and free association, but gay marriage hadn’t even been legalized in Colorado or recognized by federal courts at the time. In reality, Phillips was punished for a thought crime, even before the Obergefell ruling encouraged a culture of trivializing the First Amendment. Colorado tried to destroy his livelihood because he would not affirm, acknowledge, or implicitly endorse the worldview of a culturally approved class of customer.
And after years of great fiscal hardship, Phillips finally won a 2018 Supreme Court decision, in which the Court ruled that the Colorado commissioners had displayed “a clear and impermissible hostility toward sincere religious beliefs” in their efforts to punish him. This was a polite way of saying that the unhinged members of that commission had likened the largely powerless Phillips to Nazis and segregationists because he didn’t want to bake a cake.
While the 7–2 Supreme Court decision was a personal victory for Phillips, it did little to preserve religious liberty or free expression. Even today, a customer can walk into a business, with the force of government behind them, and demand a business owner create a product with overt political and religious messages that do not comport with that business owner’s sincerely held convictions.
And it is always worth reiterating that Phillips never declined to “serve” a gay couple in 2012, as so many misleading media reports claim. The couple, like everyone else, was free to buy anything they pleased in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Phillips refused to design a new cake from scratch for an event he felt undermined the sanctity of marriage. If it had been a pornographic cake or bawdy design for a macho-istic heterosexual bachelor party, he surely wouldn’t have made that cake either. Phillips isn’t discriminating against people; he is discriminating about the things he is willing to say.
All the Supreme Court has done is allow these cases to be adjudicated by judges who will use their mind-reading skills to discern everyone’s real intentions. After all, if former Colorado civil-rights commissioner Diann Rice hadn’t been a preening ignoramus while smearing religious Americans, the commission probably would have gotten away with it. If commissars of a similar kangaroo court keep their small thoughts to themselves, victims will have little recourse. SCOTUS has dissuaded no one.
Which brings us to the latest lawsuit.
On June 26, 2017, the day the Court agreed to hear Phillips’s case, Autumn Scardina, a transgender activist, called the Masterpiece Cakeshop and asked Phillips to design a custom cake with a blue exterior and pink interior to symbolize an illusory transition from male to female. Phillips politely turned Scardina down. Because Phillips — and if you met the man, you’d know — is polite to everyone, including his numerous harassers.
“I was stunned,” Scardina laughably told the Civil Rights Commission in her initial complaint. You may not be surprised to learn that Scardina hadn’t asked the most famous Christian baker in the nation to create a “transition” cake by happenstance. Phillips’s lawyers suspect Scardina called — the name appeared on the caller ID — to request “an image of Satan smoking marijuana.” Later, an email was sent to the shop requesting “a three-tiered white cake” with a “large figure of Satan, licking a nine inch black Dildo . . . that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.”
The director of the Colorado civil-rights division found “probable cause” in Scardina’s complaint but ended up dropping the case after being sued by Alliance Defending Freedom in federal court. After years of harassing Phillips, and a loss in the high court, Colorado almost surely would have lost.
Rather than appealing the commission’s dismissal, Scardina filed a lawsuit seeking damages, fines, and attorney’s fees. And here we are.
In court this week, Scardina’s lawyer finally admitted her client had targeted Phillips.
[Scardina] said she called Phillips’ Masterpiece Cakeshop to place the order after hearing about the court’s announcement because she wanted to find out if he really meant it.
When her lawyer Paula Greisen asked whether the call was a “setup,” she said it was not.
“It was more of calling someone’s bluff,” she said.
What kind of person would subject himself to nine years of fines, threats, ugly taunts, and lawsuits over a cake? A pious one. Phillips isn’t a bluffer. That’s why Scardina, the ACLU, the Colorado government, and many in the media have targeted the man. They want to break him to send you a message. I suspect they picked the wrong man.