They just can’t stop bullying the baker. First the Colorado Civil Rights Commission took legal action against Jack Phillips in 2012 for refusing to create a faux (same sex) “wedding” cake. After losing in the Supreme Court last summer, the state sued Phillips (shown) for declining to bake a cake celebrating a man’s transition from superficially normal to masquerading as female (what some call “transgender”). Now that Colorado has been compelled to drop that action, the masquerading man, an attorney going by the name Autumn Scardina, has filed his own suit against the baker. For sure, persecution is a full-time job.
Of course, it’s no accident that Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, was targeted. It’s part of what I’ve called a “pacification process,” where the Left is following its culture-war victories with an effort to stamp out remaining dissent.
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As the Federalist’s David Harsanyi puts it, the “campaign to destroy Phillips’s business was never merely about punishing a single man for refusing to submit to prevailing leftist orthodoxy. It was also a warning to all would-be apostates that thought crimes could lead to fiscal ruin, public denunciation, and endless harassment. In that sense, the prosecution has probably already paid off.”
It’s not the first warning, either, as Christian businessmen have already been driven out of business by the sexual devolutionaries.
Helping to effect this targeted-harassment action, Scardina had called Masterpiece Cakeshop on June 26, 2017 — the very day the Supreme Court ruled in Phillips favor in the first suit — “to design a custom cake with a blue exterior and a pink interior to symbolize a transition from male to female,” as Harsanyi relates it. (Interestingly, Scardina is still “blue” on the inside and has only, and can only, effect a pink appearance on the outside. That said, aren’t we told that the ol’ blue-pink Neanderthal-think is “gender stereotyping?”)
But Scardina is way too busy with the Christian persecution business to worry about ideological purity. “Previously, Scardina — going by ‘Autumn Marie’ and other monikers — was the one who allegedly asked for ‘an image of Satan smoking marijuana,’” Harsanyi also tells us. “In another request from ‘the Church of Satan’ — also, according to a complaint, likely Scardina — Phillips was asked to make ‘a three-tiered white cake’ with a ‘large figure of Satan, licking a nine inch black Dildo.’ How creative, right? ‘I would like the dildo to be an actual working model that can be turned on before we unveil the cake,’ went the request.”
Presumably, Scardina was testing Phillips consistency and trying to gather ammunition for a lawsuit. Yet despite an inability to demonstrate hypocrisy on the baker’s part, Scardina filed his suit last Wednesday in District Court, City and County of Denver, Colorado.
While Scardina’s effort will likely fail, the SCOTUS’s narrow ruling last summer left the door open for it. The court did not state that Colorado’s actions violated our long-held understanding of freedom of religion and speech (which they do), only that state officials had exhibited “a clear and impermissible hostility toward [Phillips’] sincere religious beliefs” (which they did). Critics say the court “punted.” Some may call its ruling a cowardly dereliction of duty.
Making it worse is that this isn’t a difficult case. The relevant points:
• While our “freedom of religion” doesn’t cover everything (e.g., human sacrifice), Phillips espouses mainstream Christian beliefs common the world over and throughout the faith’s 2000-year history. Besides, at issue isn’t his desire to perform an action, but to not be compelled to do so.
• Is forced speech free speech? Colorado’s actions against Phillips are a clear violation of freedom of speech. Note that at issue are the messages requested, not the customers doing the requesting. Moreover, the baker also refuses Halloween-oriented messages and the ones mentioned earlier, to cite just a handful. (By the way, it’s no surprise the Colorado Civil Rights Commission is in the tongue-control business. While our First Amendment precludes such commissions from explicitly policing speech, enforcing “hate speech laws” is precisely what these bureaucracies do in Anglosphere nations such as Canada.)
• In accordance with the above, Phillips does not deny service to any group; everyone can buy the goods available to anyone else. Just as with a black baker refusing to craft a cake for a KKK affair, he isn’t refusing to serve a class of people — he’s refusing to service a class of events. Now, question: When before in American history did the government compel businessmen to be party to events they found morally objectionable? Is this a bridge you really want to cross?
While Harsanyi is right about the Left’s desire to make an example of Phillips, there’s more to it. As I tweeted recently:
Burning hatred, intolerance, and anti-Christian bigotry are evident here. It’s not just the anecdotal evidence, either, such as a man identifying himself as Dean Gostling writing under Harsanyi’s article, “The radical Christian right wing is nothing more then [sic] the American Taliban. They need to be put in their place or extermanated [sic].” It’s that Christians, and only Christians, are in the crosshairs.
Four years ago, comedian-cum-social commentator Steven Crowder created a hidden-camera video (below) of Muslim bakers refusing to create a faux-wedding cake. To this day, no one — either in or out of government — has targeted these bakers with lawsuits or punitive action.
That there are many more Christians than Muslims in America is no excuse, either. Remember, these sexual devolutionary actions are targeted and pre-planned. Leftists could place Muslims in their sights as well.
They simply don’t want to.
So, ironically, they themselves are discriminating, in their activism, against Christians.
It’s more peace and love from the people most tolerant — of their own double standards.
Photo of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips: AP Images
