A dessert artist cannot simply appear before the Supreme Court as part of a historic First Amendment rights case and not venture to tell the tale.
That’s the impression given off by Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, who, following his December 2017 appearance before the high court, said he wanted to show people the brilliance of the American system of government, something he never thought he would do.
“When I was in school, a 10-page paper in my mind would have consisted of nine illustrations and a map,” Phillips, whose memoir The Cost of My Faith: How a Decision in My Cake Shop Took Me to the Supreme Court drops Tuesday, quipped in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
The book, Phillips said, is part autobiography and part legal argument, though its thrust is civic education and appreciation.
“I want people to understand how the court system works and how it was designed,” Phillips said.
“I had never been involved in any court case like this or any court case, period. Nothing can prepare you for going to the United States Supreme Court,” he added. “To go there and be the center of that was awesome and fascinating.”
The book first portrays Phillips’s cake-baking origin story, which, in short, is that he worked at a bakery after high school because he “needed a job.” It was there that Phillips discovered his love for baking, and particularly cake art, and resolved to open his own shop.
In 1993, Phillips and his wife, Debi, opened Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, but a year or two before their first official bake, the couple decided they would not create cakes celebrating Halloween or those they judged to be anti-American, nor would they create cakes depicting alcohol.
The religious and free-speech objections underlying their refusal to make those cakes led Jack Phillips to decline to create a custom cake for Charlie Craig’s and David Mullins’s wedding celebration.
The same-sex couple subsequently filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, alleging that Phillips discriminated against them on the basis of their sexual orientation in violation of state law. The commission issued a ruling against Jack Phillips, which ultimately took him to the Supreme Court, where he won.
Jack Phillips recalled that he and Debi, in their discussions about what cakes they would and would not make before they opened, considered that they could be sued for refusing service but said they were confident that the Constitution assured them the liberty to bake or not to bake.
“Even then, thinking about if somebody had complained and filed a lawsuit, you would have to assume, or I would assume, that the United States Constitution clearly protects my right to freely exercise my religion and my right of free speech,” Jack Phillips said.
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“I realized somewhere along the way, second or third year, that this was not about Jack Phillips making wedding cakes or anything like that,” Jack Phillips said. “This was about the right of every American, creative professionals, every American to live and work freely according to their conscience without fear of punishment from the government.”
