By David Harsanyi
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood,
Colo., is back in court. At this rate, the poor man will probably be
badgered to his grave.
Phillips earned his unwanted fame after an unelected
gaggle of authoritarians at the Colorado Civil Rights Commission embarked on
a six-year bigoted crusade to wreck his business after
the baker refused to design a specialty cake for a gay-wedding ceremony in
2012.
It is perhaps irrelevant to those of us who believe in
religious liberty and free association, but gay marriage hadn’t even been
legalized in Colorado or recognized by federal courts at the time. In reality,
Phillips was punished for a thought crime, even before the Obergefell ruling
encouraged a culture of trivializing the First Amendment. Colorado tried to
destroy his livelihood because he would not affirm, acknowledge, or implicitly
endorse the worldview of a culturally approved class of customer.
And after years of great fiscal hardship, Phillips
finally won a 2018 Supreme Court decision, in which the Court ruled that the
Colorado commissioners had displayed “a clear and impermissible hostility
toward sincere religious beliefs” in their efforts to punish him. This was a
polite way of saying that the unhinged members of that commission
had likened the largely powerless Phillips to Nazis and
segregationists because he didn’t want to bake a cake.
While the 7–2 Supreme Court decision was
a personal victory for Phillips, it did little to preserve religious liberty or
free expression. Even today, a customer can walk into a business, with the
force of government behind them, and demand a business owner create a product
with overt political and religious messages that do not comport with that
business owner’s sincerely held convictions.
And it is always worth reiterating that Phillips never
declined to “serve” a gay couple in 2012, as so many misleading media
reports claim. The couple, like everyone else, was free to buy anything they
pleased in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Phillips refused to design a new cake from
scratch for an event he felt undermined the sanctity of marriage. If it had
been a pornographic cake or bawdy design for a machoistic heterosexual bachelor
party, he surely wouldn’t have made that cake either. Phillips isn’t
discriminating against people; he is discriminating about the things he is
willing to say.
All the Supreme Court has done is allow these cases to be
adjudicated by judges who will use their mind-reading skills to discern
everyone’s real intentions. After all, if former Colorado civil-rights
commissioner Diann Rice hadn’t been a preening ignoramus while smearing religious Americans,
the commission probably would have gotten away with it. If commissars of a
similar kangaroo court keep their small thoughts to themselves, victims will
have little recourse. SCOTUS has dissuaded no one.
Which brings us to the latest lawsuit.
On June 26, 2017, the day the Court agreed to hear
Phillips’s case, Autumn Scardina, a transgender activist, called the
Masterpiece Cakeshop and asked Phillips to design a custom cake with a blue
exterior and pink interior to symbolize an illusory transition from male to
female. Phillips politely turned Scardina down. Because Phillips — and if you
met the man, you’d know — is polite to everyone, including his numerous
harassers.
“I was stunned,” Scardina laughably told the Civil Rights
Commission in her initial complaint. You may not be surprised to learn
that Scardina hadn’t asked the most famous Christian baker in the nation to
create a “transition” cake by happenstance. Phillips’s lawyers suspect Scardina called — the name appeared on the
caller ID — to request “an image of Satan smoking marijuana.” Later, an email
was sent to the shop requesting “a three-tiered white cake” with a “large
figure of Satan, licking a nine inch black Dildo . . . that can be turned on
before we unveil the cake.”
The director of the Colorado civil-rights division found
“probable cause” in Scardina’s complaint but ended up dropping the case after
being sued by Alliance Defending Freedom in federal court. After years of
harassing Phillips, and a loss in the high court, Colorado almost surely would
have lost.
Rather than appealing the commission’s dismissal,
Scardina filed a lawsuit seeking damages, fines, and attorney’s fees. And here
we are.
In court this week, Scardina’s lawyer finally admitted her client had targeted Phillips.
[Scardina] said she called
Phillips’ Masterpiece Cakeshop to place the order after hearing about the
court’s announcement because she wanted to find out if he really meant it.
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.
What kind of person would subject himself to nine years
of fines, threats, ugly taunts, and lawsuits over a cake? A pious one. Phillips
isn’t a bluffer. That’s why Scardina, the ACLU, the Colorado government, and
many in the media have targeted the man. They want to break him to send you a
message. I suspect they picked the wrong man.
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