After More Evidence Of Its Anti-Christian Animus, Colorado Commission Suspends Harassment Of Cake Baker By Joy Pullmann for The Federalist
Attorneys found commissioners agreeing with commissioner Dianne Rice’s comparison of baker Jack Phillips’ Christianity to the ideologies motivating slavery and the Holocaust.
After customers sued Christian baker Jack Phillips all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court yet lost their attempt to force him to bake a cake to celebrate homosexuality, the state of Colorado wouldn’t let him go. The state’s unelected Colorado Civil Rights Commission strung him up again for declining to bake another cake.
This one was ostensibly to celebrate a transgender person’s coming-out party, but it could have been for any of the many lewd baking requests his Masterpiece Cake Shop received after his case became well-known. The entire case seemed like a setup to use government force to harass Phillips for being a Christian. Phillips’s pro bono attorneys at the nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom wrote this summary of the events:
Now is your chance to support Gospel News Network.
We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
The day that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Jack’s case in June 2017, a local attorney and LGBT advocate contacted Jack’s shop requesting a cake with a pink and blue design celebrating that attorney’s transition from male to female. The request appeared to be a setup—the attorney used speakerphone and asked Jack’s employee to repeat herself so that another person could hear. In the year following that request, Jack received many requests for cakes celebrating Satan, featuring satanic symbols, depicting sexually explicit materials, and promoting marijuana use. At least one of the satanic requests came from the same Colorado lawyer. Jack declined all the requested cakes—including the pink and blue one—because they would have expressed messages that violate his religious beliefs.
That same attorney who had asked for the satanic and transgender cakes then filed a complaint with the commission after Phillips declined. The commission then began its pursuit of Phillips all over again even after he won his Supreme Court case against them.
The Supreme Court voted for Jack 7-2 but largely because, in the course of persecuting Jack for his faith, the Colorado bureaucrats had publicly let slip that their government harassment of him was based on animus against his religion. All they had to do was keep their mouths shut and arguably they could have done the same thing to Jack all over again. It seems, however, that was too much to ask.
