DENVER (AP) — The Colorado baker who won a partial Supreme Court victory after refusing on religious grounds to make a gay couple’s wedding cake a decade ago is challenging a separate ruling he violated the state’s anti-discrimination law by refusing to make a cake celebrating a gender transition.
A lawyer for Jack Phillips on Wednesday urged Colorado’s appeals court — largely on procedural grounds — to overturn last year’s ruling in a lawsuit brought by a transgender woman.
The woman, Autumn Scardina, called Phillips’ suburban Denver cake shop in 2017 requesting a birthday cake that had blue frosting on the outside and was pink inside to celebrate her gender transition. At trial last year, Phillips, a Christian, testified he did not think someone could change genders and he would not celebrate “somebody who thinks that they can.”
Jake Warner, an attorney representing Phillips from the conservative Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, said the ruling was wrong. He said requiring Phillips to create a cake with a message contrary to his religious beliefs amounts to forcing him to say something he does not believe, violating his right to free speech.
Judge Timothy Schutz noted Phillips’ wife initially told Scardina the bakery could make the cake before Scardina volunteered that the design was meant to celebrate her gender transition.
One of Scardina’s lawyers, John McHugh, said Scardina did not ask the shop to endorse her idea, just sell her a cake that they would sell anyone else. He said whether or not Phillips sells a cake to someone cannot depend on what the client tells him when he is making the cake.
Both Scardina and Phillips spoke outside the court of larger issues involved. Scardina said the case was about the “dignity of LGBTQ Americans and Coloradans and the rule of law.” Phillips said he was fighting for the rights of all Americans to live according to their consciences “without fear of punishment” by government.
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had acted with anti-religious bias in enforcing the anti-discrimination law against Phillips after he refused to bake a cake celebrating the wedding of Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins in 2012. The justices called the commission unfairly dismissive of Phillips’ religious beliefs.
The high court did not rule then on the larger issue of whether a business can invoke religious objections to refuse service to LGBTQ people. But it will get another chance when it hears a different case in coming months challenging Colorado’s anti-discrimination law.
The case involves Denver-area designer Lorie Smith, who wants to offer wedding website services but says her Christian beliefs would lead her to decline any request from a same-sex couple to design a wedding website. She also wants to post a statement on her website about her beliefs but says Colorado’s law violates her free speech and religious rights.
In agreeing to take the case, the Supreme Court said it would only examine the free speech issue.
Smith is also defended by Alliance Defending Freedom. Phillips’ lawyers unsuccessfully asked Colorado’s appeals court to delay hearing arguments in his challenge until after the Supreme Court rules in Smith’s case.
Scardina, an attorney, attempted to order her cake on the same day in 2017 that the Supreme Court announced it would hear Phillips’ appeal in the wedding cake case. Scardina testified she wanted to “challenge the veracity” of Phillips statements that he would serve LGBT customers.
Before filing suit, Scardina first filed a complaint against Phillips with the state and the civil rights commission, which found probable cause that Phillips had discriminated against her. Phillips then filed a federal lawsuit against Colorado, accusing it of a “crusade to crush” him by pursuing the complaint.
In March 2019, lawyers for the state and Phillips agreed to drop both cases under a settlement Scardina was not involved in. Warner told the appeals court panel that Scardina was required to appeal to the state appeals court first before filing a lawsuit and — since she did not — the ruling against Phillips should be thrown out because the state court judge who heard the lawsuit did not have jurisdiction.
McHugh argued the settlement did not reach a conclusion on Scardina’s discrimination claim so there was nothing to stop her from filing a lawsuit against Phillips to pursue it.
After trial of the lawsuit last year, Denver District Judge A. Bruce Jones rejected Phillips’ argument that making the cake would constitute compelled speech, saying it was simply a product sold by a business that couldn’t be withheld from people who have traditionally been treated unfairly and are protected by the state’s anti-discrimination law. He said Phillips’ decision not to provide the requested cake was “inextricably intertwined” with his refusal to recognize Scardina as a woman.
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The LGBTQ Con and deception is just to want “equality, acceptance and tolerance.”
These LGBTQ’s are the open practitioners of the infamous crime against GOD and nature,
Who sold their souls to the malicious, venomous bullies of Organized LGBTQ mafia.
These Sodomites, will not tolerate and will attack and attempt to destroy anyone and anything not accepting and promoting their degenerate, sexually perverted lifestyle.
Lev 20:13
13 “‘If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
IT has never ever, been about “JUST being accepted. ”
It has ALWAYS been about dominance and preferential treatment.
When Shoebat set out and contacted 13 popular bakers that publicly support same-sex marriage, requesting them to bake a cake displaying the message, “Gay marriage is wrong,” a less-than-tolerant response was invoked.
All of the LGBT-friendly respondents didn’t meet their own standards of understanding, tolerance and inclusion. “Each one denied us service, and even used deviant insults and obscenities against us,” Shoebat reported.
Remarks such as “Go away” and “We won’t serve you” were amongst the more tame responses, which graduated to expletive-laden tirades condemning the potential customers for their “intolerance.”
“One baker even said that she would make me a cookie with a large phallus on it just to insult us because we are Christian,” Shoebat continued. “We recorded all of this in a video that will stun the American people as to how militant and intolerant the homosexual bakers were.”
And the outbursts didn’t stop there, as many of the homosexual business owners receiving the potential orders gave Shoebat callbacks condemning the prospective clients for making such “insensitive” requests.
“We received a ton of hate messages saying that we were ‘hateful’ for simply giving them a taste of their own medicine,”
Noting what kind of reactions from the media that Christian bakers would have received had they responded in such a distasteful manner.
They talk about unfair treatment, this is what Mr. Phillips has endured from the very beginning for adhering to his religious beliefs. This smacks of a set up by someone or a group that feels they have the right to impose their own biases on everyone around them and they are making an example of the baker over and over again to make their point.
I’d bake the cake for her. Nothing says how it’s going taste
Exactly! Human waste and red pepper would be the main ingredients.
Just bake the cake inside out, upside down, use a little stink finger to make the icing and be done with it.
The cost of tossing a cake and forcing them to buy an already one with out anything on it may be worth it. Oh and when they ask to write on it misspell everything. Ah well. This push by people who think sex and thoughts of what they are take precedence to science and reality need to be reexamined.
Here’s the deal. If a business person will not fulfill your order, needs, request – so be it. In this case, find a baker who will make your transgender cake. And I bet you a 100 to 1, Jack was chosen because of his case 10 years ago.
I’ve long said, THEY ARE ONLY GOing after him repeatedly, BECAUSE OF HIS older case…