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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
I just got an order for 10,000 Red MAGA hat cakes. Sorry but I won’t get to yours for 7 years.
The Jim Crow laws were vehemently opposed by businesses for decades before they were repealed. Businesses want to make money, and being made to turn away customers, or make segregated areas, increased their costs while driving out dollars.
It is indeed important to note that Jim Crow laws were government-mandated disrimination. But I wouldn’t assume that a fully free market would always result in discriminatory businesses failing to survive.
That would often, if not normally, be the case. But in other situations the citizens of a municipality would prove generally tolerant of unjust discrimination and it would then be incumbent upon the victims to relocate. There is no reason to think the Left’s intolerance can only be expressed through law.
Actually, in a free market such discriminatory businesses would thrive as they would be catering to their own specialized niches. As it is, there are already a huge number of businesses that are, in practice, discriminatory already, and they’re doing just fine. You don’t find nail salons frequented by men, for instance, hair beading and braiding shops primarily cater to a black clientele, and so forth. And under the current regime, you have business that even actively discriminate against potential customers, vendors, or employees because the affirmative action rules and regs push them to do so. If you’ve ever had to do business with the government, you would encounter this stuff all the time.
Doubtless in an actually free marketplace you would find restaurants that would be “whites only”, or “Indians only”, or whatever. And they could be right up front with it to, making them easy to avoid. Their survival would be a marketplace issue, though, not an issue of our moral or legal concern. Let ’em be, let ’em cater to whatever niche they want, so long as others can do likewise, or cater to everyone.
There’s a Jewish deli here in Phoenix with a bakery. Someone could ask them to make a cake with a swastika and a man in stiff arm salute wearing a tiny mustache. If they refuse…
I just had a visit with my sister from Colorado. Someone in her workplace ordered a cake from Masterpiece and Jack Philips delivered it himself. According to my sister, he’s a very nice guy and the cake was fantastic.
Not really surprised by this development. When the Masterpiece decision came out, I read it and gave it a Scooby-Doo “Ruh-roh!” All SCOTUS did was tell the Colorado Civil Rights Commission how to bury the next Christian so that the findings and punishment would stick – simply don’t say what you really believe about the religious beliefs of the next Defendant and you are golden! Now, I am mildly surprised that the Commission could not overcome their ego enough to actually leave this guy alone and go after a fresh victim for example purposes to other Christian craftsman. This choice reeks of retaliation and personal vendetta for illuminating the vileness of the Commission and it’s members. The Commission will lose again due to this ego-driven persecution of Masterpiece. If they had only chosen someone else and wrapped themselves in a cloak of righteousness about it, the findings against the next guy would have likely stuck. The erosion of religious freedom would have moved a step forward. I guess other Christian craftsman can be thankful for the small favor of the Commission’s egomaniacal thirst for revenge on this guy. This removes any doubt as to the true intent of the Commission and decimates their veil of objective application of the law. Maybe they will use the Peter Strzok stance…objectivity should not be questioned despite what was previously stated.
Ok, we agree that this is a very important case, representing a vendetta by a government agency of minimal importance, against a private citizen who is just trying to live his life and make a day’s wage.
I’m sending Mr Philips $50 toward his defense tonight. I urge you all to do likewise. Even if he has free representation and even though I expect he will win, we need to support the man who has become the de facto face of anti-Christian totalitarianism. He did not ask to be a martyr.
My business was destroyed by the innumerable tiny rules hidden in Obamacare, stuff no one talks about. No need for Mr Phillips to be destroyed too.
Jack Phillips, Masterpiece Cake Shop, 3355 South Wadsworth Blvd #H-117, Lakewood CO 80227.
Because Anthony Kennedy’s ruling was limited — in that his focus in the suit was the overt anti-religious tone of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission — it virtually pre-ordained that this case was going to come back to the CRC in a different form. Here, the idea is since the cake isn’t celebrating gay marriage but instead a birthday and transgenderism, Scardina and the CRC are hoping the court will say this is somehow not a religious issue.
The problem for Colorado is, as David French points out at NR, the Scardina has been trolling Masterpiece for a considerable amount of time prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling, which eliminates the idea that Scardina innocently picked out Phillips’ store to have the birthday cake made, and points to a more coordinated effort to harass him and his employees.
Odds are the high court with Kimbrough replacing Kennedy isn’t going to see this as anything more than just another bias attack by the CRC against Phillips, and will smack them down again. Which won’t deter the activists — they’re going to keep filing suits in Blue states until the Democrats have a Supreme Court majority — but they may not be filing them in Colorado in the future, if Phillips wins his counter-suit against the state and the CJC’s harassment efforts start costing the state real money.
They’ve already had a case like that and the Colorado C.R. Commission ruled that the baker had the right to refuse to make the cake. It’s only the hated conservatives who do not have 1st Amendment rights if you’re in Colorado.
I ran out of time on my lunch break to read the entire piece. But I’m onboard so far.
Yes, I recognize that there would inevitably be some racist business owners that would discriminate. I just don’t think government coercion is the solution. Politically, it is certainly a losing argument, but that is my point about shifting the conversation. How else to shift the Overton Window than by discussing ideas which are out of bounds in the current political environment?
My completely unverifiable theory is that we would have gotten to where we are now anyways, without those laws. Does anyone think the civil rights movement would have had no lasting effect were it not for passage of the Civil Rights Act? It may have taken longer, but I believe we would have arrived at the same place eventually, except without the coercive public accommodation laws and with better race relations.
Yes, far better race relations because the resentment caused by coercion would be absent, and so would the suspicion on the part of minorities who couldn’t be sure if the white person was only doing it because a law made him.
And I think they use the fear of “if the laws go away all the racist practices comes back” to continue their grievance industry .
Exactly. In addition, the left actually believes that, if left to their own devices without a law to force them, people will make the wrong decisions every time.
The flaw in their argument is that people write all the laws. How do we know they won’t write laws mandating people do the wrong thing, again?
And yet they do things like this as well. They only impose such doubt on Western Civilization.
I think what is being described is essentially targeted harassment of Philips.
Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard . . .
It’s an organized effort to shut him down. Quite a bit seems traceable to Autumn Scardina. I would think RICO laws could be applied.