Baking cakes can be a dangerous line of work these days. It’s certainly no industry for cowards, as Edie and David Delorme, Aaron and Melissa Klein, Victoria Childress, and Jack Phillips will attest. In the last few years, their families have gone from selling confections to defending their convictions in court. They’ve been vandalized, threatened, fined, mocked, and sued for one reason: They dared to believe the First Amendment applies to them.

Now, almost a decade into this clash between religious liberty and same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court will decide if they’re right. On Dec. 5, Masterpiece Cakes’s Jack Phillips — a representative of the countless Christian wedding vendors who’ve been persecuted for their faith — will stand before America’s nine justices. He’ll ask for the same freedom our forefathers fought and even died to give him — the freedom to live and work according to his beliefs. When he does, he’ll have the support of the nation, according to polls. But just as importantly, Jack will have the support of several African-Americans.

Monday, a group of black leaders made that quite clear in a special press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court. Tired of hearing the LGBT community compare its experience to the real suffering of the civil rights movement, church and civic leaders decided to speak out about why Jack’s case matters. FRC’s Dean Nelson and FRC Action’s Patrina Mosley spoke, sharing deeply personal stories about the pain and prejudice their families experienced over the color of their skin. Patrina talked about how insulting it is to hear LGBT activists equate their “persecution” to generations of African-Americans.

The LGBT community has always been served, she pointed out — even in places like Masterpiece Cakes. And like so many other Christian wedding vendors, Jack offered to sell the men a cake. He just said he couldn’t customize it the way they wanted without violating his faith. And for that, he’s being hauled before courts and civil rights commissions, forced to undergo “re-education training,” and ordered to pay thousands of dollars in damages. As Patrina says:

What the LGBTQ activists fail to realize as they try equate their “struggle” with the civil rights movement is that the civil rights movement was borne out of the very conscience they are trying to quench. And that conscience is “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and those rights include the free exercise and expression of religion, convictions and conscience. This right is guaranteed to every American. As millennials like to say, “Can’t we all just coexist?” Well, the very nature of the First Amendment is the freedom to coexist.

Perhaps the greatest irony, Dean Nelson explained, is that if anyone can identify with what African-Americans went through, it’s Jack. “To be honest, if I think about it deeply, he is probably a modern representation of someone who went through what African-Americans actually went through. He simply wants to live his life peaceably, to conduct himself and run his business without being bothered. But yet, he is subjugated and ostracized simply because of what he believes. If [more people] knew his story, [they] would understand that he is the furthest thing [from prejudiced].”

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called his brave volunteers an army, Patrina said, but “an army whose allegiance was to God… It was an army that would sing but not slay… No arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.” That currency is for everyone. Let’s pray the Supreme Court agrees. For more on the movement to support Masterpiece Cakes, check out WeGotYourBackJack.com.

Originally published here.

UK Visits the Men’s Womb

It’s days like these that should make Americans grateful for their independence from Britain. In something that reads more like an Onion article than actual news, the UK has decided to fight a United Nations treaty because it thinks the term “pregnant woman” is discriminatory. Men can have babies too, the British government insists in its finalist for the most ridiculous policy position of the year.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) is responsible for the protest, which is astonishing even the world’s fiercest progressives. Before supporting the treaty, officials explained, “We requested that the U.N. Human Rights Committee made it clear that the same right extends to pregnant transgender people.” There’s just one problem: There are no pregnant transgender people. Women are the only humans on earth capable of carrying and bearing children. And while Britain argues that two “transgender men” have given birth, the reality is that their reproductive systems were entirely female. Despite all the advancements in technology, medicine can help people transition and function sexually as another gender — but there is, at least to date, no way for doctors to recreate female organs that actually function for reproduction.

The bottom line is that science may have found a way to change the external, but the transitions are only skin-deep. Arguing otherwise is not only nonsensical, it’s offensive. Feminists like Sarah Ditum are beside themselves with the suggestion that women can be written out of the equation of child-bearing. “This isn’t inclusion. This is making women unmentionable,” she fumed. “Having a female body and knowing what that means for reproduction doesn’t make you ‘exclusionary.’ Forcing us to decorously scrub out any reference to our sex on pain of being called bigots is an insult.”

It’s fine if you’re a kid playing make-believe, but this pretend world of adults (under the guise of “self-identity”) is a dangerous way to live. By letting people create their own realities, the UK is obviously losing its grip on its own.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.