The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Quit Persecuting Jack Phillips
One Colorado baker has borne the brunt of the Left’s totalitarian efforts to enforce conformity on the gender agenda. Never mind that Jack Phillips won at the Supreme Court. Because that ruling didn’t go far enough, he has continued to face persecution. The editors at National Review recounts the history:
In 2012, before same-sex marriage was even legally recognized in Colorado, Phillips declined to make a custom cake for a same-sex wedding, citing his religious objection to endorsing same-sex marriage. That objection was, at the time, in common not just with the law of his state but with the view of the majority of the population of nearly every American state to have voted on the question, as well as with the traditional doctrine of nearly every Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sect going back millennia. But even if his had been an unpopular minority view, this is America: There is supposed to be room for dissenters and for a diversity of thought.
Phillips never refused to serve any individual or group, and nobody has ever offered evidence that his simple refusal to participate in same-sex weddings left anyone without options for a wedding cake. In the eleven years since, Phillips has been relentlessly hounded by the government of Colorado, while he has received hundreds of requests for cakes with “offensive messages, many of them with an intent to set him up,” according to his lawyers. One of those was from Autumn Scardina, an attorney who called the cake shop on the day the Supreme Court took Phillips’s case, asking this time for a cake customized to celebrate a gender transition. Phillips would have been willing to bake the same generic pink-and-blue color-schemed cake for the same person, but not to endorse the message — which is exactly what he was asked to do, and why he was asked to do it.
The editors note that Scardina has been after Phillips for five years, “berating him and requesting, among other things, another custom cake that depicted Satan smoking a marijuana joint.” It’s all about “calling someone’s bluff,” as his lawyers admit, which has nothing to do with legitimate business practice. Scardina has also been deceptive because his only aim is suing the socks off of Phillips. But Scardina is not the only problem.
Phillips has never had a fair hearing from the progressive Democrats who run Colorado — not in the original Colorado Civil Rights Commission proceeding over the wedding cake, not in the 2021 hearing on the gender-transition cake, and not before the Colorado Court of Appeals panel that ruled on Thursday against his appeal in the Scardina case. In fact, he is being punished for not having had a fair hearing the first time, because the Supreme Court used that as an excuse not to decide, five years ago, whether he had a right to decline to bake a cake if he disagreed with its message. The high court is finally getting around to deciding a related issue this term. …
Colorado’s executive branch has been run exclusively by Democrats since 2006, and governors John Hickenlooper and Jared Polis appointed not only the leadership of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission but also the judges who ruled against Phillips. While we commend Hickenlooper and Polis for their occasional moderation on other issues, they cannot evade ultimate responsibility for the shameful yearslong persecution of Phillips, which they have openly supported. What a scandalous waste of public resources.
The totalitarianism is the point, of course, not responsible or fair governance. The editors then conclude:
The liberal promise of anti-discrimination laws is that they secure the same rights to all in a neutral fashion. The illiberal reality of their deployment by progressives in clashes between sex-based identity and faith-based identity is to demand that the faithful kneel before favored identity groups. A decent and liberal society would leave Jack Phillips alone. The Colorado government’s pursuit of him has sent a public message that it is neither decent nor liberal.