Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis wants Disney to know that his state is welcoming to all multibillion-dollar companies, just not to the small bakeries the state tries to destroy in the name of “tolerance.”
Polis denounced Florida’s “authoritarian socialist attacks on the private sector” while begging Disney and Twitter to pick up their operations and move to Colorado. Florida just stripped Disney of its special self-governing status after the company threw its political weight behind a Democratic disinformation campaign against the state’s new law on parental involvement in education. But in Colorado, you see, “we don’t meddle in affairs of companies like Disney or Twitter,” Polis said.
Of course, Disney and Twitter aren’t small businesses run by Christians. Colorado goes scorched-earth to erase those businesses from the state, as with Masterpiece Cakeshop and owner Jack Phillips. He cited his religious beliefs when declining to make a custom wedding cake for a gay couple in 2012. Phillips was still willing to serve the couple and sell them anything already available in the store, but that wasn’t good enough.
The couple filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which set out on a seven-year campaign to destroy Phillips’s business and life. Phillips was dragged through the courts, at one point being mandated to give quarterly reports to the Colorado government detailing every customer he denied service to. He eventually stopped making wedding cakes entirely, and the case wound its way to the Supreme Court.
Contrary to the rosy view of the story put forward by some conservatives, such as the Dispatch’s David French, Phillips only “won” his case in the loosest sense of the word. The Supreme Court only determined that Colorado had been too hostile, leaving activists free to challenge him over and over again until he was ruined. And that’s precisely what happened, as Phillips was again brought to court over his refusal to make a gender transition cake. In 2021, the courts made it 10 full years of harassment, as Phillips was fined. And Colorado’s law still looms over Christian business owners — such as web designer Lorie Smith, who has been dragged all the way up to the Supreme Court over her refusal to do creative work to celebrate a same-sex marriage. (The court agreed earlier this year to take a second look at it.)
While Polis tries to roll out the welcome mat for Disney just because Florida revoked a special (and previously criticized) privilege it enjoyed, religious small business owners in Colorado have to operate under constant fear of being dragged by their state government into a decadeslong court battle over their religious beliefs.
