AFN reported this week the Colorado state court, in a 4-3 decision, dismissed a lawsuit against Phillips that was brought by a transgender woman – a man – after Phillips refused to create a “gender transition” cake. The justices ruled the plaintiff, “Autumn” Scardina, should have appealed the decision by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission rather than pursue an alternate lawsuit in state court.
"The 12-year legal harassment of Jack Phillips, by LGBT activists and their allies, makes abundantly clear the ‘live and let live’ claims of the Left were lies from the start," Tony Perkins tells AFN.
“Thankfully, Jack stood strong for his constitutional right to live out his faith in the workplace, and Americans everywhere are better for it,” says Perkins, who leads the Family Research Council.
Phillips owns a Denver-area bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop, where he not only sells baked goods but is also a cake artist who creates custom-designed cakes.
Back in 2012, Phillips ran afoul of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission when two homosexual men wanted a wedding cake for their same-sex wedding. After Phillips refused, citing his Christian beliefs about marriage, the men filed a complaint with the state commission. Even though same-sex marriage wasn’t legal at the time, the commission ruled in their favor citing the blue state's anti-discrimination laws.
The commission’s ruling was appealed, and bounced around federal courts for years, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Phillips’ favor, in 2018, in a narrow decision. That high court ruling, rather than rule on his First Amendment claims, said Phillips had been the victim of religious hostility by the commission in 2012.
In that lopsided 7-2 ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch warned their colleagues the court was avoiding the larger issue of First Amendment-protected speech.
“In future cases,” the two justices wrote, “the freedom of speech could be essential to preventing Obergefell from being used to ‘stamp out every vestige of dissent and ‘vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.’”
Related article: Another Phillips court win won't discourage haters
'Enormous implications' indeed
The other side has condemned Phillips as a bigoted and hateful business owner, like a Jim Crow-era business that refused service to black customers.
"Bake the cake, bigot!" was a phrase Phillips heard often.
“Mr. Phillips believes he should have the right to treat his LGBT customers differently," Scardina complained to The Advocate, an LGBT-rights news out. "Which may seem innocuous when we are dealing with cake, but it has enormous implications.”
Pushing back on that accusation, the Christian businessman has said he does not turn away homosexual customers or transgender customers from his business. Philips told "The View" program he refuses to design a lewd cake for a bachelor party, for example, or a Halloween-themed cake with demonic imagery.
“I serve everybody, all the time,” Phillips said during that appearance in 2017. “But I don't make a cake for every event that's required of me."
The other side would argue a pretty wedding cake is not the same as a bachelor party cake with lewd imagery, which ignores Phillips' Christian belief that marriage is sacred. So the cake, he has said, is more than just a cake.
In other reaction to the Colorado ruling, National Review Online published an editorial – its fifth one about Phillips – regarding his lengthy legal battles. “Few living Americans,” the editorial began, “have stood longer against government persecution for their freedoms than Colorado baker Jack
“The people who harassed this man should be ashamed,” NRO contributor Dominic Pino commented in a related X post.
William Wolfe, executive director at the Center for Baptist Leadership, said on X that Phillips is the “subject to a decade-plus of brutal, life-destroying lawfare by the Democrats because he refuses to celebrate homosexual ‘marriage’ or bake ‘gender transition’ cakes.”
