Jack Phillips, Colorado baker and cake artist, has been in the trenches. His freedom of expression and religious liberty have been under constant attack since he first refused to make a custom cake for a same-sex wedding. He did not deny the customers service because they were gay. They could have picked any of his cakes already made in the shop. Phillips merely refused to use his artistic gifts to make a custom cake for a practice that violates his conscience and his religious beliefs. He fought for his rights all the way to the Supreme Court and won.

On June 26, 2017, a crusading “transgender” activist lawyer decided to pull the same sort of bend-the-knee authoritarian stunt that has come to characterize leftists in general and LGBTQ+ activists in particular. Autumn Scardina, the lawyer in question and male-to-female gender-confused person, went to Phillips’s bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop, to request a custom cake to represent the lawyer’s gender “transition.” According to our Thomas Gallatin, “This was only one of several order requests Scardina made for overtly offensive cake designs, several of which included requests for explicit sexual and/or anti-Christian elements.” It was a not-so-cleverly designed harassment campaign by this so-called lawyer to drag Phillips through the same ringer of legal fees and hassle through which he had just persevered.

Here we are in October 2023, and Phillips and Scardina are preparing to plead their cases to the Colorado Supreme Court. Scardina, who has been quoted as saying that the reason for his actions are to “correct the errors” of Phillips’s thinking, is actually trying to set the precedent that you can coerce anyone into the way you’d prefer for them to think. In other words, if your beliefs contradict someone else’s and you are from a “protected class,” you have the right to force them to acquiesce to your worldview under penalty of the law.

However, Scardina and those before him are quickly revealed as the true violators of our Constitution and our freedoms.

Phillips is not refusing to sell him a cake; he is refusing to make Scardina a custom cake with messaging that violates Phillips’s freedom of speech, religion, and expression.

The main issue at play here is that the state of Colorado has an anti-discrimination act that has been used as the impetus for LGBTQ+ activists in the state to persecute creatives like Jack Phillips. The Colorado Supreme Court has already had its ruling against Phillips overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of the same-sex couple. SCOTUS also preemptively forestalled Colorado’s use of its anti-discrimination law against website creator Lorie Smith. As the Washington Examiner put it, “The Colorado Supreme Court has an opportunity to end the 13-year-long harassment of Christian baker Jack Phillips.”

Phillips has precedent, but more importantly he has the foundational rights underpinning the Constitution of the United States on his side. No one — not a protected interest group or Joe Schmo off the street — has a right to dictate the beliefs and creative actions of others.

Jack Phillips has been fighting for a very long time. His trials bring to mind the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:10: “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

We stand with and for Jack Phillips and pray that Colorado ends this authoritarian madness.