Jack Phillips can’t seem to keep himself out of the courtroom.
Over three years after appearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop and petitioner in the eponymous case was back in Colorado state court March 22 to participate in a civil trial after an attorney sued him for refusing to bake a custom cake celebrating a gender transition in 2017.
In an antecedent but similar encounter in July 2012, Phillips declined to create a cake celebrating a same-sex couple’s marriage on the grounds that he would be participating in something that violates his religious beliefs about what constitutes marriage.
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That decision spurred a high-profile legal fight after the Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled that Phillips had discriminated against the couple, a ruling the Supreme Court reversed on June 4, 2018.
“They’re message-based. They’re cakes we can’t make because of the content of the cake,” Phillips said in an interview with the Washington Examiner ahead of the May 25 release of his memoir, The Cost of My Faith: How a Decision in My Cake Shop Took Me to the Supreme Court.
“It’s never the person ordering the cake,” he said.
Jack Phillips Masterpiece Cakeshop
Phillips is awaiting a ruling in Denver County District Court as to whether he violated the same Colorado anti-discrimination law invoked during the previous case in declining to create a gender transition cake for transgender attorney Autumn Scardina.
While Phillips’s legal fight reached its summit on June 4, 2018, when the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission violated the Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause in ruling against him, it remains ongoing nearly nine years later and could continue even beyond this case.
“I was told by this attorney that if it were dismissed by any technicality or if I won it, I would get a call the next day with a new cake, and we would start the process all over again,” Phillips said of Scardina, who told him that during a court-ordered mediation.
“This is the danger of these laws across the country. They’re being used to target people like Jack, not because of what they’re doing but really because of their beliefs,” said Jonathan Scruggs, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents Phillips now and did so before the Supreme Court in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
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“That’s a dangerous thing,” Scruggs added. “Using our court system [and] these laws essentially as an arm of cancel culture to try to push people of faith out of business, out of being able to earn a living.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Scardina for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
