Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who battled all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to defend his religious rights, has been punished again by a liberal judge, thus setting the stage for another trip to the nation’s highest court.
Judge Bruce Jones handed down a $500 fine for Phillips for violating Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws.
Phillips’ crime? He refused to employ his cake-decorating talents to make a blue-and-pink cake representing a transgender transition because it violated his religious beliefs.
The case was filed in 2017 by an activist lawyer who targeted Phillips after the Supreme Court took up his first controversy.
That was his refusal to make a customized cake for a gay wedding on the same grounds.
The Colorado Human Rights Commission ruled that Phillips had indeed discriminated against the couple – apparently unmoved by the idea that Phillips is not the only baker in town.
The Supreme Court overturned that decision, saying the commission had violated Phillips’ First Amendment rights.
In that case, Justice Clarence Thomas noted, “States cannot punish protected speech because some group finds it offensive, hurtful, stigmatic, unreasonable, or undignified.”
“If that freedom (of speech) is to maintain its vitality, reasoning like the Colorado Court of Appeals’ must be rejected.”
That will be tested again in the new case.
Not only did Judge Jones fail to consider the high court’s previous ruling, but he also rejected the activism of Autumn Scardina, the lawyer who filed the complaint against Phillips, and who acknowledged that she only went to Phillips’ bakery to trigger a reaction. She admitted that she saw her request for the cake as “calling someone’s bluff.”
So Phillips will go back to court because a judge refused to see a good precedent and bad faith.
Kristen Waggoner, general counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative group assisting Phillips, said the “harassment” of people like Phillips must stop.
“Jack Phillips serves all people but shouldn’t be forced to create custom cakes with messages that violate his conscience. In this case, an activist attorney demanded Jack create custom cakes in order to ‘test’ Jack and ‘correct the errors’ of his thinking, and the activist even threatened to sue Jack again if the case is dismissed for any reason. Radical activists and government officials are targeting artists like Jack because they won’t promote messages on marriage and sexuality that violate their core convictions,” Waggoner said in a statement.
“This case and others — including the case of floral artist Barronelle Stutzman, (who refused to create a wedding floral arrangement for a gay wedding) whose petition is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court — represents a disturbing trend: the weaponization of our justice system to ruin those with whom the activists disagree.”
“The harassment of people like Jack and Barronelle has been occurring for nearly a decade and must stop. We will appeal this decision and continue to defend the freedom of all Americans to peacefully live and work according to their deeply held beliefs without fear of punishment,” said Waggoner.
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I’m not sure what religion the baker is but he does not seem to be Christian.
‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ and ‘judge ye not, least ye be judged’ and excluding people for any reason especially sin means that he should be excluding everyone, everyone.
This cherry picking of which sin to segregate on is not in the bible.
Jesus did not exclude anyone.
Even if you take the abhorrent position of LGBT are going to hell (which I assume he is) then to disallow them human rights in an advanced society is more likely to keep them from Gods grace, something he is not passing on as he should.
You should be helping them into church for God to work on their soul, not giving them back to Satan… or is that the actual plan to make sure these people don’t get to see God through Jesus? If that’s the case then he is not working for Jesus in any way shape or form.