A Colorado court this week decided to punish baker Jack Phillips for refusing to design a cake that celebrates a gender transition because of his Christian beliefs.
Phillip’s legal team is continuing the fight, setting in motion an appeal of the Colorado court’s decision in Scardina v. Masterpiece Cakeshop.
“Jack Phillips serves all people but shouldn’t be forced to create custom cakes with messages that violate his conscience,” said Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) General Counsel Kristen Waggoner, reacting to the court decision.
Waggoner is representing Phillips and has been for nearly a decade.
“In this case, an activist attorney demanded Jack create custom cakes in order to ‘test’ Jack and ‘correct the errors’ of his thinking, and the activist even threatened to sue Jack again if the case is dismissed for any reason,” she explained. “Radical activists and government officials are targeting artists like Jack because they won’t promote messages on marriage and sexuality that violate their core convictions.”
“This case and others — including the case of floral artist Barronelle Stutzman, whose petition is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court — represents a disturbing trend: the weaponization of our justice system to ruin those with whom the activists disagree,” empathized Waggoner. “The harassment of people like Jack and Barronelle has been occurring for nearly a decade and must stop.”
“We will appeal this decision and continue to defend the freedom of all Americans to peacefully live and work according to their deeply held beliefs without fear of punishment,” she announced.
Related: WALSH: The Persecution Of Jack Phillips
On the same day Phillips won a Supreme Court case in 2018 over his refusal to create a cake celebrating gay marriage, he was asked by a transgender activist to create a cake celebrating gender transition. The Daily Wire reported:
In the Masterpiece Cakeshop case of 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission evinced anti-religious bias for targeting Phillips for refusing to make a same-sex wedding cake,” The Daily Wire reported. “The Court did not rule whether a business could claim religious objections permitted them to refuse service to gays or lesbians.
On June 26, 2018, the United States Supreme Court ruled that it would hear Phillips’ case against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which revolved around him turning down a request to make the wedding cake for a gay couple in 2012. After he was targeted by the state of Colorado, Phillips was barred from designing custom wedding cakes, which, as the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) noted, represented around 40% of his business. ADF also noted that one of the commissioners belittled Phillips’ religious freedom defense, calling it a “despicable piece of rhetoric.”
The very day that the Supreme Court decided to hear Phillips’ case, his wife, Debi, got a call from Denver transgender attorney Autumn Scardina asking Phillips to make a birthday cake celebrating Scardina’s “gender transition.”
In March, Phillips told Fox News that this latest legal trouble was “a trap,” The Daily Wire reported:
“This case started the day the Supreme Court decided they were going to hear our case. It was a very busy, very crazy day at the shop,” Phillips explained. “In the middle of all of this chaos, we got a phone call from an attorney in Denver asking us to create a cake pink on the inside with blue icing on the outside.”
Phillips told Fox News that he was told “it was two colors, a color scheme, a combination, designed to celebrate a gender transition.”
“We told the customer, this caller, that this cake was a cake we couldn’t create because of the message; the caller turned around and sued us,” Phillips told Fox News. “This customer came to us intentionally to get us to create a cake or deny creating a cake that went against our religious beliefs.”
He added, “This customer had been tracking our case for multiple years. This case was just a request to get us to fall into a trap.”
Related: Colorado Baker Discusses New Case, Says It Was ‘A Trap’