Faux Christian Jack Phillips Again Proves He's A Bigot

Likely emboldened by the Supreme Court's refusal to squarely address the issue of whether claimed or feigned religious belief allows ones to be exempt from non-discrimination laws and public accommodation laws - and encouraged by the hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom ("ADF") - Jack Phillips, the owner of the infamous Masterpiece Cakeshop is back in federal court.  This time he is suing the State of Colorado and defending his refusal to create a cake to celebrate a milestone in the life of a sexual minority.   Let's be blunt.  Phillips is a self-centered bigot who sadly now feels he has a platform from which to encourage similar modern day Pharisees to insult and reject those they don't like. Meanwhile, his legal counsel at ADF won't be happy until homosexuality is re-criminalized.  Anything and anyone who challenges the Christofascists' Bronze Age myth based beliefs must be attacked and crushed. A piece in Politico looks at the new round of bigotry and pretense of martyrdom on display from Phillips.   Here are highlights:

Difficult decisions can be deferred, but not ultimately avoided. So it is that Jack Phillips, the owner of the famous Masterpiece Cakeshop is back in federal court, again defending his refusal to create a cake to celebrate a milestone in the life of a sexual minority.

This time, it’s a birthday cake celebrating a gender transition he’s declining to bake, and it’s not clear how the courts will balance the parties’ competing interests. That’s because of the Supreme Court’s dithering on the issue earlier this summer.

Just two months ago, the Supreme Court confounded expectations on all sides with its side-stepping decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. It looked like the case had nicely teed up the question of how to accommodate two competing interests. On the one side stood a gay couple that wanted to buy a wedding cake from a business that had an obligation under Colorado state law not to discriminate against them on the basis of sexual orientation. On the other stood the owner of the cake shop, Jack Phillips, who claimed that requiring him to create a cake in celebration of a same-sex wedding would violate his constitutionally protected rights of religion and free expression. How would the court resolve these competing claims?

It didn’t. . . . . The case didn’t even provide useful guidance for another case that was then before the court. A florist had refused to create an arrangement for the gay wedding of a couple she’d known for years, citing her religious belief. After sitting on the case for many months, the court finally decided not to hear it, vacated the judgment in favor of the couple, and directed the lower courts to resolve the matter in accordance with its Masterpiece Cakeshop decision. But that is no help at all, unless the case is also found to have involved anti-religious animus.

Now comes Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Elenis. Phillips, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian [hate] group that represents clients in lawsuits that involve challenges to religious freedom, contests a finding by Aubrey Elenis, the director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division, that there is “sufficient evidence” to support a claim of discrimination in the case.

Sardina revealed that she wanted the cake to have a pink interior and a blue exterior. Then she added that the colors were to celebrate her coming out as transgender on her birthday, some years earlier. At that point, Debi Phillips (Jack’s wife, and the co-owner of the cake shop) declined to create the cake because of the Phillipses’ belief that gender was biological, and immutable.

If that’s all there is to the case, it’s not hard: Sardina should win under the Colorado anti-discrimination law, which protects customers in certain enumerated classes—including sexual orientation and transgender status—from the denial of service in places of public accommodation (like a bakery). . . . . If she had told Debi Phillips that she wanted the blue/pink cake for a gender-reveal party, as a clever way of announcing that she was going to deliver boy/girl twins, we can safely assume the request would have been honored. The complaint admits that the “problem” with the cake is its association with a message the owners don’t agree with. But a pink/blue cake, without more, doesn’t send a “message” about gender transition.

It would be a different story if Sardina had also requested that Jack Phillips write “Happy Gender Transition Day!” because the government can’t compel a business owner to engage in speech he finds objectionable. But the simple act of creating a blue-pink cake doesn’t send any message at all—unless that message is that Phillips refuses to create a given cake for one class of people (those hosting gender-reveal parties) but not for others.

In short, Phillips’ refusal here is the very essence of discrimination, and the court should have no part of endorsing it. In the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, there was a lively exchange in concurring opinions between Justices Neil Gorsuch and Elena Kagan about this very question—whether Phillips’s right to freedom of expression would allow him to refuse to create a cake he knew would be used for a gay wedding, even if that cake were identical to a cake he might make for a “traditional” wedding.

Kagan’s position is that a business owner can’t refuse to bake a cake for one customer, but not another. That doesn’t mean Phillips would have to create a cake reading “I love gay marriage!”, but, as she noted, in the case before the court the couple “requested a wedding cake that Phillips would have made for an opposite-sex couple.” She properly rejected Gorsuch’s view that the controversial confection would have been “a cake celebrating same-sex marriage” because of its significance to the couple and Phillips alike. As Kagan noted: “It was simply a wedding cake – one … suitable for use at [all] weddings.” That’s the only interpretation of the law that can keep it from collapsing into a free-for-all, in which the mere invocation of free expression is enough to defeat any claim of discrimination.

If a business owner can refuse to serve one customer the exact same product that he’d willingly sell another based on an objection to the use to which the product would be put, we might just as well admit that anti-discrimination laws are toothless.

That doesn’t mean Sardina will win the case if it does get to the Supreme Court, though. With Kennedy out of the picture—and Brett Kavanaugh his likely replacement—the conservative justices will be more apt to grant review of close cases, knowing they have the five votes they need to roll back the court’s more progressive decisions.

[I]t’s easy to forget that the discrimination laws are in place for a reason, and that the same logic that would allow religious objectors to deny service to the LGBT community would also permit turning away a couple that wanted to celebrate an interracial wedding.

Personally, I wish decent people would simple boycott Phillips' bakery and allow it to wither away or limp along with only a bigoted Christofascist client base.  I'd prefer to have no cake than have one baked by a foul, self-centered, grandstanding bigot.