Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, is once again fighting for his right not to use his talents in service to causes that would violate his strongly held religious beliefs.
This time, a publicity-hungry lawyer, a transgender named Autumn Scardina, asked Phillips to make a birthday cake. The baker initially agreed but refused after Scardina informed him the cake was to celebrate Scardina’s transition to another gender.
The carefully choreographed incident by Scardina was all so that Scardina could sue Phillips for refusing to recognize gender transition.
Phillips’ old nemesis — the Colorado Civil Rights Commission — took up the case. The Colorado rights agency had been slapped down by the Supreme Court in 2018 after the justices agreed with Phillips that the Commission had acted with “anti-religious bias” in pursuing a case involving a gay couple wanting a wedding cake.
This time, Phillips countersued, accusing the Commission of a “crusade to crush” him by pursuing the complaint. In March 2019, lawyers for the state and Phillips reached a settlement, but Scardina maintained the suit.
Now, the Colorado Court of Appeals has ruled against Phillips.
The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that that the cake Autumn Scardina requested from Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop, which was to be pink with blue frosting, is not a form of speech.
It also found that the state law that makes it illegal to refuse to provide services to people based on protected characteristics like race, religion or sexual orientation does not violate business owners’ right to practice or express their religion.
Relying on the findings of a Denver judge in a 2021 trial in the dispute, the appeals court said Phillips’ shop initially agreed to make the cake but then refused after Scardina explained that she was going to use it to celebrate her transition from male to female.
The appeals court judges based their decision, at least partly, on the gobsmackingly stupid idea that pink cake with blue frosting “is not inherently expressive and any message or symbolism it provides to an observer would not be attributed to the baker.”
Are we so far gone that pink for girls and blue for boys has lost its meaning in society? Of course not. The judges are being radically obtuse.
The court also rejected Phillips’ procedural arguments that Scardina failed to exhaust her administrative remedies and that her lawsuit was rendered moot when he offered to pay her $500.01 while still denying that he had violated Colorado law.
Phillips’ lawyers vowed a further appeal.
“No one should be forced to express a message that violates their core beliefs,” Jake Warner, his lawyer at the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, said in a statement.
The appeals court judges are playing a gigantic game of “pretend.” They’re pretending there is no gender significance to the colors pink and blue and that a baker refusing to acknowledge someone who wants to change his or her gender despite the clear religious implications of that act isn’t violating his own closely held beliefs.
If the judges are that good at mind reading, maybe they should take that act on the road to Vegas. It’s not playing well in the heartland.
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