If it’s civilly actionable for an arm of the State of Colorado to operate with hostility toward religion, Jack Phillips has to have the most open-and-shut case in the history of American jurisprudence.
What happened today doesn’t guarantee Phillips will win the suit or collect damages, but it means he’s going to be able to present his case, and it’s one heck of a strong case:
The owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop can proceed with his lawsuit against the state of Colorado after a judge refused to dismiss the case.
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Jack Phillips has accused the Colorado Civil Rights Commission of anti-religious bias because it punished him for refusing to bake a cake celebrating gender transition. Phillips, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, filed suit when the state chose to prosecute him even after he won his case at the U.S. Supreme Court in June.
Judge Wiley Y. Daniel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado ruled the suit against the state can move forward.
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“Colorado is acting in bad faith and with bias toward Jack,” said ADF Senior Counsel Jim Campbell. “We look forward to moving forward with this lawsuit to ensure that Jack isn’t forced to create custom cakes that express messages in conflict with his faith.”
The Colorado Civil Rights Commission said Phillips discriminated against Denver attorney Autumn Scardina because she’s transgender. Phillips’ shop refused to make a cake last year that was blue on the outside and pink on the inside after Scardina revealed she wanted it to celebrate her transition from male to female.
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The Colorado Civil Rights Commission has a vendetta against Phillips, and it’s obviously about nothing other than Phillips’s Christian faith and his unwillingness to compromise it when customers walk in the door and demand that he do so.
The fact that Phillips won his first case at the Supreme Court was obviously welcome news, but we found out pretty quickly that the SCOTUS majority had left the door open for Colorado go after Phillips again, and the state quickly did so. Indeed, it was the fact that the CCRC was so openly hostile toward religion that won both Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer over to the majority, while not requiring them to actually find that Phillips flat-out had the right to refuse to bake a gay wedding cake or a transgender cake.
The roadmap to success in destroying Jack Phillips was laid out for Colorado: Next time go through the motions of giving him a fair hearing, and don’t publicly berate him for being a Christian, and SCOTUS just might find in your favor next time.
But will it? Gay rights hero Anthony Kennedy is retired and has been replaced by Brett Kavanaugh. And this latest assault on Phillips is such an obvious setup, it presents all kinds of peril for religious freedom if it’s allowed to stand.
The person who walked into Masterpiece Cakeshop asking for a cake to celebrate his/her “transition” (with blue on the outside of the cake and pink on the inside, and we don’t need to say any more about that), clearly went in there intentionally to create a civil rights case. By now, everyone in Colorado knows that Masterpiece Cakeshop is owned by a Christian man who doesn’t bake cakes with messages that contradict his faith.
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Because the SCOTUS ruling in Phillips’s favor was so narrow that it failed to completely establish Phillips’s right to choose his own artistic expression, it teed things up for Colorado to take another shot at destroying him. It was obvious to Phillips that this was exactly what the state was doing, and he wasted no time filing suit against the state.
The question now is: Assuming Phillips wins, what will that mean? Will the state have to pay Phillips damages commensurate to the lost business and legal expenses he’s had to absorb? Will it have to pay punitive damages for harassing a law-abiding business owner who did nothing wrong and merely wanted to conduct business consistent with his faith?
Will the Colorado Civil Rights Commission see its authority reduced by the court after proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it can’t be trusted to wield it fairly and justly?
The best outcome would be for this to end up at the Supreme Court again, and for the Justices this time to issue a ruling that leaves absolutely no doubt: No business owner can be forced to provide a service that violates his faith. Period.
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The left will scream that this would empower business owners to “refuse to serve gays lunch” or whatever, but that’s absurd. For one thing there is nothing in the Bible that says Christians should be mean to gay people or anyone else, only that we can’t be involved with celebrating their sin. For another thing, there is no mass movement among Christian business owners to do any such thing. They just want the right to decline when asked to do something that is a clear violation of our faith.
And anyone who tries to use some twisted concept of Christianity as an excuse to mistreat people is not going to survive very long in business, although the news media would surely hold any such person up as typical of all Christian business owners, even though if they went to other Christian business owners, such a person would certainly be denounced widely.
Win, Jack! And thank you for fighting the fight, along with his attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom. This is a fight that needs to be won. Colorado insisted on picking it. It’s time for Jack Phillips to finish it.
