Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips just wants to bake in peace. Yet more and more these days he's finding himself in court, not the kitchen. The Christian, who runs the now household name of a bake shop in Colorado, was first sued back in 2012 after refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. They and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission sued Phillips and the case eventually reached the Supreme Court of the United States. Last June, the High Court voted 7-2 in favor of Phillips. Only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
"The government, consistent with the Constitution’s guarantee of free exercise, cannot impose regulations that are hostile to the religious beliefs of affected citizens and cannot act in a manner that passes judgment upon or presupposes the illegitimacy of religious beliefs and practices," the opinion of the Court read.
A few years after the first lawsuit, a transgender lawyer, Autumn Scardina, asked Phillips to bake a gender transition cake, which would be pink on the inside and blue on the outside. Of course, his faith compelled him to say no, after which Scardina filed a complaint with, you guessed it, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Phillips in turn sued the state, but the two parties came to an understanding and dropped all charges against each other in March.
You'd think that'd be the end of it. Yet, Scardina returned last week to file a lawsuit against Masterpiece in the Denver District Court.
"We simply want the law to be enforced,” Scardina's attorney Paula Greisen said. “Because if not, you allow a business to send a message: go ahead, refuse service to these people, it’s OK, when the citizens of Colorado have said it’s not."
The document reads that Phillips has engaged in "continued discrimination against the LGBT community in violation of Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act and the Colorado Consumer Protection Act." Scardina and her lawyers argue that she was asking Phillips to create a "simple design" that he would have provided if she was not transgender.
Phillips must be the most exhausted baker in America.
“It seems I’m the only person in the state of Colorado who can’t live out my beliefs,” he said last year.
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