Is Cake an Artistic Medium? The Supreme Court Will Decide This Fall.

“The name is Masterpiece Cakeshop. I thought of that when we first opened up that masterpiece, to me, it indicates art,” Phillips tells the WEEKLY STANDARD. “Then we have a logo, its got a paintbrush, then a pallet, and a french whip for cooking so it incorporates art and cooking.”

Phillips seems genuinely confused, and more than a little bit hurt, about what has happened to him since 2012. Anyone who’s met Phillips will tell you that he’s an exceedingly gentle soul; he speaks so softly it’s hard to hear him seated just a few feet away. Phillips is a devout Christian and his faith has lead to him being sanctioned by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for refusing to make specialty cakes for gay weddings. (At the time Phillips first came under fire for refusing to make a cake for a gay couple’s ceremony, gay marriage was not yet legal in the state, and a declaration that marriage was only between one man and one woman was enshrined in the Centennial State’s constitution.)

It matters not to the CCRC that his refusal to provide custom cakes for ceremonies of religious significance that he objects to isn’t unique to gay weddings. Over the years, Phillips has refused to make cakes celebrating divorce. Phillips is so committed to his faith he doesn’t make anything for Halloween, nor does he bake cakes with alcohol in them. And it’s not just about religious doctrine: He turned down one customer who wanted him to make a cake telling off his boss. He’s fielded multiple requests to make cakes with derogatory messages about homosexuality, which Phillips has refused as mean and uncharitable. Whether it’s Augustine’s writings about the distinctions Between the City of God and the City of Man or Martin Luther’s Doctrine of Vocation, Christian teaching has been clear for more than 2,000 two thousand years that one cannot disregard fundamental beliefs as a consequence of being in the public square.

He now finds himself at the center of a Supreme Court case that will be heard this fall—Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission—that will determine whether Phillips has the right to refuse service based on his right to be considered an artist.

When he was in school, Phillips originally wanted to be a painter and artist. “[With a] 10 page term paper, if I was assigned one, I would try to turn in 9 illustrations and a map,” he says. But a high school guidance counselor had suggested that was an impractical goal for earning a living, and that stuck in his mind. He soon discovered that skills involved in painting transferred almost directly to decorating cakes. He spent two decades honing his craft, working in other bakeries, before opening his own shop.

“I took what I learned from the water colors—the water color washes and stuff—and transferred those to cake. The canvas is my cake,” he says. “And the pallet knives you push your paint around and you do the same thing with the icing. So a lot of the same techniques that you use in painting and drawing, cartooning, kind of come into play in a cake.”

Just behind the counter in the cake shop are two wide-mouthed round containers stuffed to the brim with brushes and other accoutrements that Phillips uses to literally paint designs on to cakes—his cakes with dramatic Colorado mountain landscapes are especially striking.

Phillips offers a level of detail and customization that is on an entirely different level from a grocery store with pre-fab cake designs and quick turnaround. When he opened up his shop 24 years ago, bakeries offering his level of artistic detail were exceedingly rare. Televised baking competitions and foodie culture have made what he does a little less unique, but even now Phillips’ artistry is regarded as exceptional. When a Denver production company was hired to make commercials for the TLC show Cake Boss, Phillips was hired to make the cakes that appeared in the promos for the show.

It’s nearly impossible to argue Phillips is violating public accommodation laws; he doesn’t refuse service to anyone who comes in looking for already baked goods, birthday parties, and other nonreligious occasions that don’t run counter to his faith. He even made a point offering to sell the gay couple who filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission anything in his store, so long as it wasn’t asking him to make a custom wedding cake.

At issue is whether or not Phillips can refuse to use his artistic talent to make a wholly unique cake celebrating a vision of marriage that violates his conscience. Creating meaningful wedding cakes was a responsibility Phillips took quite seriously. From 2007 to 2009, Masterpiece Cakeshop won the “Best of Weddings” award from the wedding website The Knot.

But he’s not about to win anymore awards for wedding cakes. To comply with the CCRC directive that he must make wedding cakes for gay weddings, he’s stopped making wedding cakes altogether. Since he stopped making wedding cakes, Phillips’s business is down about 40 percent, he says. He’s downsized from 10 employees to four.

Remaining in business has been difficult for other reasons. He’s received regular death threats, including one harrowing episode where the caller mentioned that he was coming to shoot him and he knew that his daughter was in the shop with him at the time. At the time, it wasn’t public knowledge that Phillips had a daughter. The caller stayed on the line, announcing what cross streets he was at as he got closer to the shop. Phillips ushered his daughter and grandkids into the basement, called the cops, and waited. The caller never showed up, but Phillips still quakes when he tells the story. “I took to answering all of the phone calls because I don’t want the staff that I had dealing with this stuff because it was really hateful,” he says.

Despite the dual challenges of staying in business and in the public spotlight, Phillips isn’t backing down now. All he ever wanted to do be an artist, and making cakes allowed him to fulfill that lifelong dream. And on some level, it’s the legal battle has become deeply personal.

In 2014, Colorado Civil Rights Commissioner Diann Rice weighed in on Phillips’s conscience rights by saying, “Freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust, whether it be—I mean, we— we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination.”

Aside from the fact that Phillips doesn’t discriminate against anyone based on who they are, Phillips keeps a couple of volumes of World War II histories that belonged to his deceased father. Scribbled in the margins are his dad’s notes of his own service. The elder Phillips landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, and went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was hit with a mortar. (In one of the books, his father identified the exact spot on a map near Wiltz, with the note “blown in the air.”) As if that weren’t enough, the ambulance carrying him off the battlefield hit a mine and flipped, dumping all of the wounded into the snow. Still, his father made it back to England and recovered in time to head back to Europe, where he was part of the force that liberated the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

Not many things upset Phillips, but to have practicing his own faith be compared to the Holocaust, which his own father nearly gave his life to stop, has been almost too much to bear. Phillips knows exactly what his father would think about his present ordeal. “I know he’d be proud, but he’d also would say that he would be disgusted with the system how it’s working. He didn’t go over there for entertainment, he went over there to fight for our freedom,” he says.

Phillips wasn’t always sure what his dad would think of him. His father had grown up in Iowa working in packing houses, and later became a butcher. One of the few key bits of advice he offered his son was “Don’t go into retail!” When Phillips did just that, his father expressed his approval by coming into his son’s bakery and sitting at one of the tables every morning for the first three years it was open, greeting customers and chatting with friends, until he died.

At the time Phillips’s father died, it would have seemed crazy to him that that his son would have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to fight for his own modest version of the American dream. “In the cemetery over here in Fort Logan where he’s buried, there are rows and rows of [veterans’] headstones—that’s what he fought for,” says Phillips. “And for them to say, ‘[his son’s freedom] doesn’t count anymore,’ he would roll over in his grave.”