Tag: Jack Phillips

Religious Liberty Had Major Court, Legislative Wins in 2023

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Advocates for faith won several major victories this year through the legislature and the court, despite a growing hostility toward religious communities.

There were several examples of anti-religious sentiment over the past year, some of which included an FBI-drafted memo targeting traditional Catholics as “potential domestic terrorists” and the University of West Virginia’s transgender training labeling Christians as oppressors. However, 2023 also boasted several victories for religious Americans in schools, the workplace and the pro-life movement.

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Commentary: Cake Maker Jack Phillips Is STILL in Court

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Jack Phillips

The endless travails of the Colorado Christian baker Jack Phillips are a measure of America’s pathetic descent into coercive secularism. Phillips has spent at least a decade in court, beating back the ludicrous claims of ACLU-style militants who can’t rest until everyone has been dragooned into the LGBTQ revolution. Phillips was at first persecuted for declining trolling customer demands that he design cakes for gay nuptials. He survived that assault, but now faces fallout from the transgender lobby’s mau-mauing of his business. In 2017, a man pretending to be a woman sued him for not designing birthday cakes in honor of “gender transitions” — an obvious nuisance suit that the state of Colorado and activist judges have humored. Phillips is back in court fighting it.

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Judge Rules Christian Baker Jack Phillips Must Make ‘Gender Transition’ Cake

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Jack Phillips

A Colorado baker and self-described cake artist who won a 2018 victory at the Supreme Court faced a related setback this week when a state court ruled in another case that the law requires him to make a cake to celebrate a gender transition. 

Denver District Court Judge A. Bruce Jones ruled against Jack Phillips, the Christian owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, in the case of Scardina v. Masterpiece Cakeshop. 

“The anti-discrimination laws are intended to ensure that members of our society who have historically been treated unfairly, who have been deprived of even the every-day right to access businesses to buy products, are no longer treated as ‘others,’” Jones wrote Tuesday in a 28-page opinion.

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Commentary: Washington State May Have Triggered the Next Major Religious Liberty Case

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by John Bursch   One year ago last week, in a major religious liberty case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Christian cake artist Jack Phillips. Yet just one year later, a floral artist in Washington state now finds herself in similar circumstances to Jack. Her case could prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit the matter. In the Supreme Court’s 7-2 ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court rebuked the state of Colorado for its hostility toward Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips and his religious beliefs. Though the court’s decision spelled a needed victory for Jack, it stopped short of addressing a broader constitutional question: Are creative professionals like Jack, who gladly serve everyone but simply decline to express certain messages or celebrate certain events, free to live according to their faith without fear of government coercion? Rather than wading into that question, the high court ruled in Jack’s favor because of the hostility Colorado had shown throughout a six-year ordeal that left Jack no option but the highest court in the land. The state’s unelected civil rights commission openly compared Jack’s attempts to protect his religious freedom to the actions of slaveholders and…

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Christian Cake Baker’s Attorney: Third Lawsuit Is ‘Rehash’ of ‘Old Claims’

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Jack Phillips

by Rachel del Guidice   A Colorado baker is being sued for a third time for refusing to design custom cakes that he says run contrary to his religious beliefs. Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado—first sued in 2012 for declining to create a custom cake for a same-sex wedding because of his traditional Christian beliefs—is being sued again, this time for not baking a “birthday cake” to celebrate the gender transition of Autumn Scardina, who now identifies as a transgender woman, according to The Christian Post. In June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Phillips 7-2, holding that the Colorado Commission of Civil Rights—which had ruled that Phillips had discriminated unlawfully—demonstrated “clear and impermissible hostility” toward Phillips and his Christian belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, as The Daily Signal previously reported. After Phillips’ Supreme Court win, he was sued a second time by the state, this time on Scardina’s behalf, but the suit was dropped when Phillips countersued. A Colorado baker is being sued for a third time for refusing to design custom cakes that he says run contrary to his religious beliefs. Jack Phillips,…

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Commentary: Christian Cake Baker Turns the Tables, Sues Colorado for Anti-Religious Bias

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Jack Phillips

by Thomas Jipping   Jack Phillips owns Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, and is himself a master baker. He’s in trouble with the state of Colorado for declining to create a custom cake for an event because doing so would violate his religious beliefs. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Phillips has already taken a similar case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor on June 4. Here’s the background. In 2012, Phillips declined the request by a same-sex couple marrying in Massachusetts that he create a custom cake for their reception in Colorado. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in a ruling affirmed by the state courts, concluded that Phillips violated a state law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in businesses and other places of public accommodation. The case, as the Supreme Court would describe it, presented a conflict between the government’s authority to protect individuals against discrimination and “the right of all persons to exercise fundamental freedoms under the First Amendment.” This conflict is recurring, in different settings, more and more often. To understand this conflict properly requires focusing on the reason that Phillips declined to make this particular cake. He…

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The Flawed Red Hen Analogy Shows Liberals Still Don’t Understand Christian Baker Case

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Sarah Sanders, Jack Phillips

by Monica Burke   After a Lexington, Virginia, restaurant, the Red Hen, refused service to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday, commentators on the left immediately seized upon a false analogy. They likened that incident to the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, the case of the Christian baker in Colorado who refused to craft a custom cake for a same-sex wedding. That attempt at an analogy reveals that the left still does not understand the Supreme Court’s ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Jack Phillips, the baker, serves all customers, but cannot serve all events. He declined to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple not because of their identity, because he could not communicate a message that violated his religious beliefs. He even offered the couple any other item in his store. Meanwhile, the Red Hen denied service to Sanders precisely because of who she is. They did not refuse to create a custom order that would have endorsed views they disagreed with. They denied her service, period. The false analogy also reveals the hypocrisy of the left’s position. They accuse people like Phillips, who serves everyone regardless of who they are, of discrimination,…

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The Supreme Court Rules 7-2 for Baker Jack Phillips in Gay Wedding Cake Lawsuit

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Jack Phillips

In a closely watched decision Monday, the Supreme Court found the Colorado owner and master baker of Masterpiece Cakeshop was within his rights when he refused to make a custom wedding for a same-sex wedding, saying that to do otherwise was against his moral and religious convictions. (Full decision embedded below.) Jack Phillips, a Christian, was sued by David Mullins and Charlie Craig, a gay couple, when Phillips said he would not participate in their wedding by designing a custom cake (although he would sell them any non-custom item they wished). The Daily Caller News Foundation reported: After a short discussion with the prospective patrons, Phillips said he would not sell them a custom wedding cake due to his deeply-held religious beliefs. Mullins and Craig filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, prompting a lengthy legal battle culminating in an appeal to the high court. Kennedy explained that the Colorado law can validly protect LGBT patrons, must found the state agency applied the law in a manner hostile towards Phillips’ evangelical beliefs. “That consideration was compromised, however, by the commission’s treatment of Phillips’ case, which showed elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection,”…

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Family Action Council of Tennessee Joins Amicus Brief Supporting Christian Baker in Same-Sex Wedding Case

Wendy Wilson

  The Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT) has joined 32 other family policy councils nationwide in filing a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a Colorado baker accused of discrimination for declining to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the major, closely-watched case involving Jack Phillips and his family business, Masterpiece Cakeshop. The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that a state law could force Phillips to create a custom cake that conveys a message contrary to what he believes as a Christian. Phillips and his attorneys petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case. The amicus brief was drafted by David French, an attorney and senior writer for National Review who lives in Columbia, about 45 miles south of Nashville. In a letter to supporters, David Fowler, the president of FACT, said joining the amicus brief is in keeping with “our mission to defend free speech and religious liberty.” The Supreme Court has received at least 45 friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the baker. The support comes from 479 creative professionals, 20 states including Tennessee, and 86 members of Congress, all Republicans. A variety of legal experts, civil rights advocates and religious…

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