Colorado baker Jack Phillips is back in court again, this time because he didn’t want to bake a cake celebrating a gender transition.
The Left has persecuted this man relentlessly, even after he won his case before the Supreme Court in 2018. Unfortunately, it is because of his Supreme Court victory that the activists looking to make an example out of Phillips are able to do so.
National Review’s Andrew McCarthy made this point earlier this week, and it’s an important one. Even as conservatives celebrated the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, in which the bench ruled 7-2 that Colorado acted in an unacceptable and hostile way toward Phillips’s religious beliefs, many warned that it wouldn’t be enough. It was too narrow and avoided the core issue: Can the government force creative professionals to create custom art expressing messages that violate their religious beliefs?
The Supreme Court avoided this question entirely and instead focused on the process, ruling that the way Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission went about dealing with Phillips exhibited “anti-religion bias.”
As McCarthy notes, Chief Justice John Roberts almost certainly opted for this procedural argument to get two of the liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, on board with the decision. He’s more concerned with “non-partisan collegiality” than with “the Court’s actual jobs of acting as a bulwark for constitutional liberties against oppressive government, and with providing clear guidance to the lower courts,” McCarthy writes.
And as a result, Phillips is going on his ninth year of defending himself in court.
At least this time, Phillips’s aggressor admitted she had targeted him deliberately.
When her lawyer Paula Greisen asked whether the call was a “setup,” she said it was not.
“It was more of calling someone’s bluff,” she said.
The message sent by Scardina, and backed by the Woke Left, is simple: Change your beliefs and accept ours, or be ruined. This is bigotry, plain and simple, and the Supreme Court has a responsibility to make this right should Phillips end up there again.
