The woke crusade against Christian baker Jack Phillips continues.
The religious owner of the Colorado-based Masterpiece Cakeshop rose to national prominence after he, in 2012, declined to make a custom wedding cake for a same-sex wedding. Phillips cited his First Amendment right to not promote ideas contrary to his cherished religious values. The local Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that Phillips’s decision violated anti-discrimination law, and he endured years of harassment, threats, and lost income.
The baker’s case ultimately made it to the Supreme Court in 2017-2018, where a 7-2 decision, narrow in its scope, vindicated Phillips. The justices declared that the commission had treated Phillips with unconstitutional anti-religious hostility. But this was not the end of Phillips’s legal troubles.
The same day that the Supreme Court announced it would take the baker’s case, a local activist sought him out and demanded that he bake them a custom “gender transition celebration cake” — undoubtedly knowing Phillips would decline and hoping to ensnare him in another lawsuit. This follow-up case has played out in the years since the Supreme Court decision, and a judge just ruled against Phillips and fined him for supposedly violating Colorado anti-discrimination law.
“The anti-discrimination laws are intended to ensure that members of our society who have historically been treated unfairly, who have been deprived of even the every-day right to access businesses to buy products, are no longer treated as ‘others,'” Judge A. Bruce Jones wrote. “This case is about one such product — a pink and blue birthday cake — and not compelled speech.”
Phillips and his lawyers will fight the decision and appeal it.
Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents Phillips, said that this second case against the baker “represents a disturbing trend: the weaponization of our justice system to ruin those with whom the activists disagree. We will appeal this decision and continue to defend the freedom of all Americans to peacefully live and work according to their deeply held beliefs without fear of punishment.”
I’ve followed this case for years now and even personally interviewed Phillips for my podcast. So, it’s perfectly clear to me what’s going on here: a crusade, a holy war by far-left identitarian activists, targeting a peaceful and tolerant Christian for refusing to embrace their beliefs.
To be clear, neither case is about blanket discrimination.
Although the liberal media coverage certainly suggests otherwise, Phillips has never hung a “no gays allowed” sign in his window. Gay customers can and always have been able to walk in and buy anything off of the shelves. The baker simply will not create custom, expressively artistic cake designs that explicitly or implicitly endorse ideas he fundamentally disagrees with — whether it’s vulgarity, the celebration of Halloween, or yes, same-sex marriage and gender transitioning. (Interestingly, Phillips also told me he would refuse to create a custom cake bearing anti-gay slurs.)
His case is about freedom of speech, not religion-fueled blanket discrimination. Indeed, the very same Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that other bakers could refuse to make cakes bearing anti-gay bible verses. As a gay person myself, I certainly would want the right as a business owner to refuse to promote or endorse anti-gay messages — but on matters of constitutional rights, we cannot have double standards or have things both ways.
This is why I believe Phillips should prevail in the merits of these cases. Yet, there’s now more to this than a legal dispute. In my conversation with Phillips, he came across as a generally kind-spirited and tolerant man — tolerant in the truest sense of the word, live-and-let-live. He and I come from remarkably different walks of life and hold very different values but plan to have lunch or chat over coffee the next time we’re in the same city.
Yet, the activists targeting him and more broadly surging to dominance on today’s Left are anything but tolerant. As far as I am aware, a “gender transition celebration cake” isn’t even a thing, and there are undoubtedly dozens of other bakeries who would have been happy to accommodate the unusual request. That wasn’t the point: Phillips was purposefully targeted for his religious beliefs.
Leftist activists have adopted new, radical social dogma — that even their heroes, such as Barack Obama, disagreed with just a decade ago. They expect not just tolerance of their ideas, but the unadulterated embrace of them by all. Dare to be a holdout, and the crusade will come for you next.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a Washington Examiner contributor and host of the Breaking Boundaries podcast.
