Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Again
Having recently been set in its place by the Supreme Court, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (spoken wrong-think punishment authority) is after baker Jack Philips again. According to this story in the Daily Caller, the commission has issued a probable cause determination that Phillips has discriminated against an individual by not making a cake celebrating a gender transition. The Alliance Defending Freedom is again representing Phillips and has filed a suit against the commission “accusing the panel of violating his constitutional free exercise, free speech, due process, and equal protection rights.”
Even though the baker won at the Supreme Court the decision was narrowly tailored and opened Phillips up to further action from the state provided the commission applies the state’s law in an unbiased manner. Having passed on the opportunity to confirm the first amendment protection for the free exercise of religion, the court opened the door for religious persons to face harassment from the left should they attempt to run their businesses according to their deeply held religious beliefs.
Before the first case was even heard, the barrage began against Phillips.
On the same day the high court agreed to review the Masterpiece case, an attorney named Autumn Scardina called Phillips’ shop and asked him to create a cake celebrating a sex transition. The caller asked that the cake include a blue exterior and a pink interior, a reflection of Scardina’s transgender identity. Phillips declined to create the cake, given his religious conviction that sex is immutable, while offering to sell the caller other pre-made baked goods.
In the months that followed, the bakery received requests for cakes featuring marijuana use, sexually explicit messages, and Satanic symbols. One solicitation submitted by email asked the cake shop to create a three-tiered white cake depicting Satan licking a functional 9 inch dildo. Phillips believes Scardina made all these requests.
The illiberal left is at it again and using the state with its poorly executed laws as a bludgeon to destroy all opposition. Perhaps in a year or so when the baker’s case again winds its way to the highest court in the land, and with Kavanaugh and Gorsuch on the bench, the Supreme Court will finally have the courage to affirm our very first rights.
Published in General
Unbelievable.
Nope. Totally believable.
If I lived in Colorado, I would have Jack Phillips meet all of my cake baking needs.
There’s a difference between persecution and prosecution. This guy is in the former category.
It was cartoonist Al Capp who said, “Hell hath no fury like a Liberal scorned.” The Commission has taken their loss at court personal and are determined to make him pay.
Is there a Legal Defense Fund? Is he being represented by a Legal Foundation? If so, which one, and is it a tax-deductible Foundation?
I would create a tee shirt saying “I am Jack Phillips” but I don’t think people would understand.
He should tell them he’s become a Muslim. Let’s see them demand this of a Muslim.
You are one of the brightest Ricochetti! You remind me of how Churchill and Thatcher had very quick and witty rejoinders!
I paid him five dollars to say that.
It was ten dollars!
Alliance Defending Freedom.
Steven Crowder did:
It is easy to foresee the more carefully crafted hatred Jared Polis appointees will bring to the Commission.
Stapleton-Polis is the most important race nobody is talking about.
Couldn’t Phillips just craft a beautiful wedding cake and then press it down into a ridiculous looking cookie and call that his “Trans Cake”?
Am I the only one that thinks a business should be able decline a customer for any reason or no reason at all? I know that opens the door back up to racial discrimination, but I wish we could discuss an alternative solution other than assuming a default position that the government has a right to force a business into serving every customer that walks in the door unless the owner really really really sincerely believes with all his heart it’s against his religion. This should be about the freedom to engage in commerce with whomever you wish, not about religious freedom. We should be using these opportunities to shift the discussion. Perhaps there is another way to combat discrimination other than applying public accommodation laws to every non-essential product or service under the sun.
Can’t someone find a Democrat baker and order a KKK cake?
I’d start with making it easier to open a new business…
I have argued such here: http://ricochet.com/510879/no-more-protected-classes/
Agree entirely.
Don’t the members of the Colorado un-Civil Rights Commission have better things to do with their time?
Doesn’t Autumn?
What is effing wrong with these people?
I like to remind lefties that Jim Crow laws were government-imposed violations of the freedom of association. The government itself was the violator.
And now they’re going to force association. Which is still a violation of that freedom.
Just listened to The Three Martini Lunch and David French thinks it’s a slam-dunk case for Philips to win. From his lips to God’s ears!
My response from earlier today:
That’s actually not a bad idea. What if conservatives flooded the bakery with business so that he simply couldn’t take on any more.
That’s the default libertarian position.
Servers of food commodities cannot discriminate. Think lunch counters refusing to serve to people of color in the South in the 50’s. This is not a good line of argument to pursue. A cake that is decorated becomes art and is the artistic freedom of expression of the artist. It can’t be compelled.
I don’t think this legal paradigm is necessary in 2018.
There’s this weird assumption that if the government didn’t force association through legal means, then the citizens would all prove to be racist bigots, refusing to serve anyone who didn’t look like them.
I think we should put that assumption to the test.
Get rid of all these force-association laws. The free market will quickly demonstrate that this isn’t the case at all. Businesses who did refuse to serve particular races would quickly gain a bad reputation and likely not survive in the free market. I don’t always have faith in the free market, but in this case I do, because I believe that in spite of the media cherry-picking the worst news in order to prove their theories that Americans are racist/sexist/bigoted/homophobic/Islamophobic rednecks, Americans are, instead, the most open and welcoming people in the world.
To be fair, there was perhaps a need for such laws in order to break the back of institutional and government supported racism in the south post reconstruction. It should have been a temporary thing.
The racism of southern democrats could not withstand market forces (read Williamson today on tyranny vs. the market), so they created laws and institutionalized the racism and enforced it with the power of the state.
The difference is explained above. It wasn’t that the servers of food refused; rather, it was that state laws mandated they refuse.
How we got from there to here, where republicans are supposedly the racist (and perceived as being historically so) is an interesting question. The standard argument is that the racist democrats switched to being republicans, but I’ve not seen convincing evidence of it.
So to recap, anti-discrimination laws were originally federal laws to stop states from mandating discrimination occur. Now the state level anti-discrimination laws mandate action (the states really love telling people what to do) that violates individual free exercise of religion and conscience.