The Never-Ending Persecution Of Jack Phillips

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/06/the-never-ending-persecution-of-jack-
phillips/

You have no legal ‘right’ to compel others to say things they don’t
believe.

By the time I visited Masterpiece Cakeshop in 2016, Jack Phillips, the man
who had famously refused to bake a specialty cake celebrating the wedding
of a gay couple, had been the victim of a four-year campaign of harassment
by the authoritarians at the Colorado Civil Rights Commission intent on
punishing him for a thought crime.

Now Phillips is back in the news, as his lawyers attempt to get new
charges against him dismissed on appeal from a Colorado judge’s decision
last year.

For the past decade, the media and lawyers and judges and leftists have
misrepresented Phillips’ position. No, the baker never turned a gay couple
away from his shop. Or a transgender person. Or anyone else. No, he never
refused to sell anyone a wedding cake (ceremonial, in the case that made
him famous, as the request predated both Obergefell and Colorado’s
recognition of gay marriage). Philips refuses to create any specialty item
from scratch that features any message that conflicts with his long-held
religious beliefs. He will refuse to create such cakes for any customer,
gay or straight or black or white.

After years of 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 [Phillips’] sincere
religious beliefs” in their efforts to punish him—by which the justices
meant members had compared Phillip’s faith to that of Nazis and
segregationists. While it was a personal victory, it did almost nothing to
preserve religious liberty or free expression rights.

Really, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission
wasn’t much of a personal victory, either. All the commission now had to
do was avoid openly attacking faith. A person can still walk into a
business in Colorado and demand the proprietor create a message that
conflicts with their sincerely held convictions — as long as that message
comports with the contemporary left’s evolving virtues.

We know this is true because it happened again. In June 2017, on the day
the Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’s case, a transgender activist
named Autumn Scardina called Masterpiece and requested a custom cake with
a blue exterior and a pink interior symbolizing gender transition.
Scardina, who was almost certainly the same person who called Masterpiece
later to order “a three-tiered white cake” with a “large figure of Satan,
licking a 9" black Dildo” and another cake with “an image of Satan smoking
marijuana,” knew the baker would turn the offer down.

“I was stunned,” Scardina lied to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission,
later admitting that the activism was about wanting to “correct the
errors” in Phillips’s thinking. A thought crime. The commission — this
time, doing its unconstitutional work without any superfluous commentary —
agreed that Scardina had been discriminated against as a transgendered
person. Judge A. Bruce Jones of the Second Judicial District upheld the
commission’s decision. Now, Phillips has to go through the entire ordeal
again. And we have to listen to people distort the case and the law.

The Associated Press claims that these types of cases “pit the rights of
LGBTQ people against merchants’ religious objections.” Again, this is
factually incorrect, since Phillips wouldn’t create a transition cake
requested by a non-transgendered person or a straight pornographic cake or
a cake pronouncing Xenu the one true God, either.

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, argues that the best way
to signal “your opinion that this baker is on the wrong side of moral
history” is to not solicit his services. “Boycott his business. Contract
with other bakers. If his income stream diminishes he’ll either go out of
business or rethink his policies,” he tweeted. Does anyone who’s spent
more than a minute reading about this case believe that Scardina, or any
of the other people harassing Phillips, are happening on Masterpiece
Cakeshop looking for transition cakes? When I wrote about Phillips in
2016, I counted a dozen other bakeries within a five-square-miles of
Masterpiece. Is the right side of “moral history” compelling people to say
things when there are 12 other establishments that will cater to your
needs?

There is no legal “right” to compel others to say things they don’t
believe. Until the Supreme Court explicitly reaffirms the foundational
protections of religious liberty and free speech, there will be no end to
the state compulsion or harassment. There is some hope in the case of
Denver-area web designer Lorie Smith, who refuses to create websites for
same-sex couple marriages, which the Supreme Court has taken up this term.
Let’s hope the justices do their jobs this time.


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