Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission fame is being sued for anti-LGBT discrimination.
Again.
The Colorado-based Christian baker is in court this week for refusing to make a cake honoring a would-be customer’s gender transition. The lawsuit comes a few years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Phillips’s favor in a separate case stemming from his refusal to bake a cake for a gay couple’s same-sex union.
“Jack is being targeted for his religious beliefs,” said Alliance Defending Freedom’s Kristen Waggoner, who is representing Phillips. “His opponents are weaponizing the law to punish and destroy him because he won’t create expression that violates his Christian faith. They want to make the law an arm of cancel culture.”
To avoid a repeat of what happened after he refused to make a cake for a same-sex union, Phillips stopped selling wedding cakes altogether, which was, by all accounts, his specialty. The New York Times once described his handiwork in this area as actual art. This decision has led to a nearly 40% drop in business, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Now, Phillips, who, by the way, is not the only baker in the entire state, is back in court over another allegation of anti-LGBT bias.
The latest lawsuit dates back to 2017, according to the Wall Street Journal, “when Autumn Scardina called Mr. Phillips’s shop. She requested a custom cake — pink on the inside, blue on the outside — reflecting her gender transition.”
Scardina called Masterpiece Cakeshop immediately after hearing the Supreme Court would hear Phillips’s appeal in the case involving his refusal to make a cake for a gay couple’s same-sex union. Scardina’s attorney, Paula Greisen, maintains the order was not part of a “setup.”
“It was more of calling someone’s bluff,” Greisen said.
Phillips declined Scardina’s request for the blue-and-pink cake. Scardina immediately complained to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which is the same group that sanctioned Phillips after he declined to make a cake for the same-sex union (the Supreme Court ruled the commission showed anti-religious bias when it did this).
“The commission pursued the case but dropped it in 2019 after Mr. Phillips filed a federal lawsuit against the state,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
In March 2019, “lawyers for the state and Phillips agreed to drop both cases under a settlement which still allowed Scardina to pursue a lawsuit on her own,” the Associated Press reports.
Scardina’s court filing claims a birthday cake was requested, not a cake celebrating the gender transition. The filing also accuses Phillips of refusing service because she is transgender.
“But her story has shifted,” the Wall Street Journal notes. “In her original complaint to the commission, she wrote that she’d told the bakery the design was ‘intended for the celebration of my transition from male to female.’”
It’s also important to note that Scardina, an attorney, asked Phillips to make a second cake featuring Satan smoking a joint.
Asked why, of all things, Sardina wanted a Satan-themed cake, the supposed would-be customer said the intention was to persuade Phillips to see the “errors of his thinking.”
“Jack didn’t single Scardina out for being transgender,” said Waggoner. “He wouldn’t bake cakes with those messages for anyone,” adding that Phillips won’t even make Halloween-themed cakes.
Couple the oddly specific nature of the proposed cake designs with Scardina admitting the point is to make an example of Phillips, and it’s clear what is happening.
It’s clear activists are going after Phillips with a sustained campaign of targeted harassment. There is no other charitable way to interpret the demand that Phillips, who is well known as a conservative Christian, create cakes with messages that are in direct contradiction with his religious beliefs. These customers are asking things of him they know he’ll decline. That’s the point.
“Today, it’s Jack,” said Waggoner. “Tomorrow, it could be you.”
