DENVER (LifeSiteNews) — Christian baker Jack Phillips returned to the all-Democrat Colorado Supreme Court on June 18 to defend his right not to make cakes bearing messages in which he disbelieves, particularly regarding LGBT ideology, in the latest development of a battle that has consumed a decade of his life.
In 2018, “Autumn” Scardina, a man who claims to be “transgender,” filed a complaint against Phillips, the proprietor of Masterpiece Cakeshop, for declining to bake a cake that would be pink on the inside and blue on the outside to celebrate his “transition” to “female.” Colorado Civil Rights Division (CCRD) director Aubrey Elenis claimed there was probable cause to conclude that Phillips had unlawfully denied Scardina “equal enjoyment of a place of public accommodation.”
In response, the religious liberty nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a federal lawsuit against outgoing Democrat Gov. John Hickenlooper and the state civil rights commission, accusing them of ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Phillips’ favor over cakes celebrating homosexual “marriage” and continuing to discriminate against Phillips’ faith.
In March 2019, the state attorney general’s office announced that it and Phillips’s attorneys “mutually agreed to end their ongoing state and federal court litigation,” including the CCRD action against Phillips, though the agreement did not preclude Scardina from filing a civil suit of his own in state court, which he did. In January 2023, Division IV of the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled against Phillips’s right to decline Scardina’s request. In October, the Colorado Supreme Court agreed to take up the matter.
“Scardina is misusing Colorado’s public-accommodation law to target Jack in the lawsuit,” ADF says. “This is the same law that was at issue in 303 Creative v. Elenis, a case in which ADF attorneys represented graphic artist Lorie Smith. In June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 303 Creative that Colorado cannot misuse its public-accommodation law to force people to express messages they don’t agree with. ADF attorneys have asked the Colorado Supreme Court to apply this ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Scardina to affirm Jack’s First Amendment freedom from government-coerced expression.”
The Associated Press reports that during oral arguments, Justice Melissa Hart pressed Phillips on whether he would have been willing to make an identically colored cake for a customer who wanted the colors to signify newborn twins rather than a “gender transition.”
Phillips’s attorney Jake Walker countered that Scardina’s request “became a different message when Phillips was told it was to celebrate and symbolize a transition from male to female,” giving it free-speech implications. “Cakes can appear facially identical and you can have facially identical content that expresses a different message.”
Justice William Hood signaled his position on the case when he said “public accommodations laws are designed to get us away from your kind isn’t welcome here, and it feels to many like this just substitutes ‘kind’ with the word ‘message,’” Reuters adds.
In a June 19 op-ed published by Fox News, Phillips himself explained that he “decide[s] to create custom cakes based on what they will express, not who requests them. It’s always the message, never the person. And cakes often communicate. As far back as Roman times, people have requested custom cakes to express messages.”
“If the state can punish me, it can force a lesbian designer to create custom graphics criticizing same-sex marriage; it can force a Black sculptor to create a white cross promoting the racist Aryan Nation Church; and it can force a Taiwanese cake artist to create a custom red cake to celebrate the communist revolution,” he said. “No government should have that kind of power.”
Phillips relayed meeting a “local man, who identifies as gay and a former activist,” who “wanted to see for himself who I was and why I was taking this stand. I warmly welcomed him and asked how I could serve him. He’s been back at least 25 times. I’ve created cakes for him. He’s asked me to pray for things, and I have.”
Phillips’ years of ongoing legal battles stem in large part from the nation’s highest court declining to issue a clear ruling on the core issues of the dispute when it had an opportunity to do so in his original battle against being forced to create a homosexual “wedding” cake. Instead of clearly affirming that Phillips’s First Amendment rights had been violated, as conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch had advocated in concurring opinions, former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion found that the state civil rights commission had displayed a “clear and impermissible hostility toward” the baker’s “sincere religious beliefs.”
ACLU attorney David Cole, who represented the homosexual “couple” who sued Phillips, wrote at the time that his side had “lost a battle but won the war,” interpreting Kennedy’s words to mean that absent such hostility, “states are free to require businesses, including bakers,” to provide pro-homosexual services, such as wedding cakes, to customers. Cole went so far as to say the plaintiffs “could go right back into Masterpiece Cakeshop today and request a cake to celebrate their wedding [sic] anniversary.”
ADF maintains that the ongoing legal attacks on Phillips demonstrate that “for some, it will never be enough to politely agree to disagree about important issues like the meaning of marriage or whether to celebrate a ‘gender transition.’”
“It wasn’t enough for Jack to lose a big part of his business after Colorado targeted him the first time. It wasn’t enough for Jack to have to defend his freedoms all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And it wasn’t enough for Jack and his family to endure years of harassment and even death threats. For some, it won’t be enough until Masterpiece Cakeshop closes its doors.”