Bigoted baker back before the bench

Jack Phillips, owner of Lakewood’s Masterpiece Cakeshop, made local, national and even international headlines over much of the past decade for his 2012 refusal to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins.

Attention to that case peaked in June 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he could deny service based on his Christian beliefs but now there’s been almost no prominent media coverage of Phillips’ latest discrimination trial.

In March, he was fines $500 in Denver District Court to for his June 2017 decision not to make a birthday cake for Autumn Scardina, a transgender woman.

While at first blush, the case — originally filed in 2019 — might seem virtually identical to the previous one, lawyer Paula Griesen of Denver-based King & Griesen LLP, who’s representing Scardina in conjunction with Reilly Pozner LLP‘s John McHugh, argues that this latest controversy “is very different” from the previous one.

Explains Griesen: “This is saying, ‘There’s a line here. You cannot decide you will not serve me because of my status and base that on religious beliefs.'”

Kate Anderson, senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, the national organization that’s worked on Phillips’s behalf for years, disagrees.

“Jack serves everyone; he just can’t express all messages through his custom cakes. Even after the Supreme Court condemned the state for acting with ‘clear and impermissible hostility’ toward Jack because of his beliefs, Jack continues to be targeted,” Anderson said. “Scardina’s relentless pursuit of Jack is an obvious attempt to punish him for his views, banish him from the marketplace and financially ruin him and his shop.”

“Free speech is for everyone, including those we disagree with,” said Anderson, defending the notion that cake is not for everyone. “A win for Jack would affirm the right of all Americans to live and speak freely.”

In his ruling in June, Denver District Judge A. Bruce Jones said Scardina was denied a cake that was blue on the outside and pink on the inside to celebrate her gender transition on her birthday in violation of the law.

While Phillips said he could not make the cake because of its message, Jones said the case was about a refusal to sell a product, not compelled speech.

He pointed out that Phillips testified during a trial that he did not think someone could change their gender and he would not celebrate ‘somebody who thinks that they can.’

‘The anti-discrimination laws are intended to ensure that members of our society who have historically been treated unfairly, who have been deprived of even the every-day right to access businesses to buy products, are no longer treated as ‘others,’, Jones wrote.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—who could face up to 99 years in prison for a six-year-old indictment charging him with defrauding investors in a technology firm stock—joined a multistate amicus brief in support of religious liberty, in a case that is pending in the Colorado Court of Appeals.

Scardina v. Masterpiece Cakeshop is the second case brought against Jack Phillips, a baker, under state public accommodation laws—this time because he refused on religious grounds to make a custom cake celebrating a customer’s gender transition.

Paxton faces three counts: two for securities fraud, and another for acting as an investment advisor or representative without registering.

Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, the son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and the nephew and grandson of two former presidents, announced that he is running in the 2022 Republican primary election against the GOP incumbent who is also shadowed by an FBI investigation.

Bush has served as Texas’ land commissioner since 2015.

The Washington State Supreme Court upheld the ruling of a superior court judge who ruled against a florist that denied service to a gay couple, saying that the U.S. Supreme Court had for 135 years ruled “laws may prohibit religiously motivated action, as opposed to belief.”

“In trade and commerce, and more particularly when seeking to prevent discrimination in public accommodations, the courts have confirmed the power of the legislative branch to prohibit conduct it deems discriminatory, even where the motivation for that conduct is grounded in religious belief,” the judge stated.

Individuals hoping to win a license to discriminate against LGBTQ people often run afoul of laws enacted in the 1960s, which were designed to stop the unjust racial segregation that existed since the ned of slavery.

Since the anti-discrimination laws and policies did not assert that people cannot be denied service due to a disability, or sexual orientation or other arbitrary condition that might make them a target for bigotry, the limits have been tested over and over, but with a few exceptions since the shift in the top court’s makeup, justice has prevailed.

Whether or not that remains the case is a question for the radical majority on the US Supreme Court, one-third of which was appointed by disgraced former President Donald Trump.