Colorado Supreme Court Vindicates Christian Baker Persecuted by LGBTQ Activists
Owner of mom-and-pope cakeshop wins third legal battle in 12 years
A bakery owner who has been fighting a protracted legal battle for the right to reject orders for cakes with messages that violate his Christian faith has won another landmark legal victory.
On Tuesday, the Colorado Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by attorney Autumn Scardina, who sued cake artist Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop near Denver, in June 2017 for refusing to make a cake (pink with blue frosting) to celebrate a gender transition.
Scardina, a man who identifies as a woman, later asked for a custom-designed cake depicting Satan smoking marijuana. Phillips rejected that request as well.
Victimization Saga
Scardina complained to the Colorado Civil Rights Division in 2017, accusing Phillips of “unfair or deceptive trade practices” by advertising “they would sell birthday cakes to LGBT individuals with intent not to sell such cakes” and employing “bait and switch advertising to that effect.”
After the baker sued the state for targeting him on religious grounds, officials dropped the complaint against him. The state settled with Phillips in March 2019.
Scardina waited until long after the deadline had passed to appeal that decision, then sued Phillips in 2019 over the “gender-transition” cake in the state court, seeking monetary damages of over $100,000 in addition to legal fees by using Colorado’s public-accommodation law, which ensures consumers are not denied access to basic goods and services because of their race, color, religion, or national origin.
In June 2021, the court ruled that Phillips could be punished for declining to create custom cakes that violate his beliefs. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) appealed the verdict to the Colorado Court of Appeals that August.
After the Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision in April 2023, ADF appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court.
Shortly afterward, in June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a separate case concerning a Colorado web designer who had been similarly targeted for refusing to create websites for same-sex weddings that states cannot use public-accommodation laws to violate the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech. And that freedom also includes the right not to speak, especially when artistic creations are involved.
Victory at Last
In July 2023, ADF filed a supplemental notice asking the Colorado Supreme Court to apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis to similarly affirm the Phillips’s First Amendment rights.
Finally, in a 6-3 majority opinion, Colorado’s Supreme Court dismissed the case on a technicality while declining to weigh in on the free-speech issues that brought Phillips’s case to national attention.
“The underlying constitutional question this case raises has become the focus of intense public debate: How should governments balance the rights of transgender individuals to be free from discrimination in places of public accommodation with the rights of religious business owners when they are operating in the public market?” Justice Melissa Hart wrote in the majority opinion. “We cannot answer that question.”
Justices Richard Gabriel, William Hood and Maria Berkenkotter dissented, calling the ruling “troubling on many levels.”
“Substantively, the majority’s ruling throws Scardina completely out of court and deprives her of the opportunity to seek a remedy for alleged discriminatory conduct based on a novel interpretation of law that no party asserted and, to my knowledge, no court has adopted,” Gabriel wrote.
Homosexual Persecution
Phillips’s legal battles began in July 2012 after homosexual couple ordered a cake for their upcoming “wedding” reception.
Phillips said he could not create a cake celebrating a same-sex wedding because it violated his religious beliefs. He offered to make other baked goods for the gay couple, even cakes for other occasions, but referred them elsewhere for the cake for the ceremony.
Phillips insisted he was not discriminating against the couple because they are gay; it was only the wedding service itself he could not accommodate.
The men filed complaints with the Colorado Civil Rights Division contending that Phillips had violated Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act, and the Commission agreed.
In August 2015, the Colorado Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the Commission’s order, finding that Phillips discriminated because of sexual orientation in violation of state law. The court also ruled that Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act did not infringe the baker’s freedom of speech or free exercise of religion.
The Colorado Supreme Court denied review, so Phillips petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that free speech protected the baker’s art and that Colorado’s public accommodations law had compelled Phillips “to create expression that violates his sincerely held religious beliefs about marriage” thus violating the First Amendment.
Kennedy’s Verdict
In a stunning victory for Phillips in June 2018, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s decision, saying that earlier rulings “showed elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs motivating his objection.”
The Colorado commissioners “disparaged Phillips’ faith as despicable and characterized it as merely rhetorical, and compared his invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust,” the judgment stated.
The SCOTUS ruling also explicitly declared that “it is not … the role of the State or its officials to prescribe what shall be offensive,” just as it is not for the state to “prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.”
The Colorado commission was wrong to judge Phillips’s views on same-sex marriage as “offensive” because it amounted to the “judgmental dismissal of a sincerely held religious belief” and is “antithetical to the First Amendment,” the ruling noted.
Ironically, the late Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the ruling, was the architect of the Obergefell v. Hodges opinion that gave same-sex couples the right to marry.
Homosexual Hypocrisy
The SCOTUS ruling also took into consideration the case of William Jack, a Christian educator from Colorado who in 2014 approached three bakeries, asking them to bake a Bible-shaped cake with two men holding hands and an X on top.
Jack asked one baker to inscribe “God hates sin. Psalm 45:7” and “Homosexuality is a detestable sin. Leviticus 18:2” on the cake. He asked the other two bakers to decorate the cake with the text, “God loves sinners” and “WHILE WE WERE YET SINNERS CHRIST DIED FOR US. ROMANS 5:8.”
All three bakers refused Jack their services. When Jack sued, the Colorado Civil Rights Division ruled in favor of the three bakers, arguing that they had the right to refuse, not because of Jack’s religion but because he wanted “derogatory language and imagery” on his cakes.
The SCOTUS ruling exposed the hypocrisy of homosexual activists insisting on their right to discriminate when they are offended, while simultaneously demanding that religious people should be forced to do something even if they find the requests offensive.
Twenty-three states, six Colorado legislators, and several free-speech advocates filed friend-of-the-court briefs with the court supporting Phillips.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.