Posted on 09/09/2017 7:46:07 AM PDT by DenverCossack
Jack Phillips answered the phone at his bakery, Masterpiece Cake Shop in Lakewood. It wasn’t a social call. The caller said he was on his way to kill Phillips.
“He said he was going to shoot me in the head,” Phillips said. “I’ve had other threats, but this sounded legitimate enough. He told me ‘I’m driving down this particular street, and I’m ready to turn down that one.’ I believed he was coming to the shop.”
The caller said he would also harm Phillips’ daughter, who worked in the store.
Police made a futile effort to trace the call, and the man never arrive.
It was one in a long series of threats made against Phillips since a Thursday in 2012, when David Mullins and Charles Craig came to his store and ordered a cake for a celebration their “marriage.” Same-sex marriage was illegal in Colorado at the time. Coloradans had voted in 2006 for a state constitutional amendment that defined marriage as a union “between one man and one woman.”
Phillips politely declined to design a cake, but offered to sell the men any other goods in the store.
“One of the men said ‘it’s for our wedding,’ so right away I knew I could not do this form them,” Phillips recalled. “I could not use the artistic talents God had given me to create an expression for a religious ceremony that violates my faith. I had nothing against these gentlemen, and they are welcome in my store anytime. It was not because they were gay. It was because of the cake they wanted me to create.”
The high-profile conflict immediately changed the course of Phillips’ life, leading to a case the Supreme Court of the United States agreed in June to hear. Oral arguments in Masterpiece Cake Shop, Ltd. V. Colorado Civil Rights Commission will likely be scheduled for December, with a ruling in the spring of 2018. The Colorado Catholic Conference plans to co-sign an amicus brief in support of Phillips.
“People need to understand how much this case could impact everybody,” said Phillips’ attorney, Jeremey Tedesco of the Alliance Defending Freedom. “If government can force Jack Phillips to act against his conscience, it can do this to anyone on any issue. It is about how much power we want the government to have over our lives, in what we express. If we give them this power over Jack, we give them power over us all.”
Phillis said Mullins and Craig stormed off after he declined their request for an expression on cake. They started an email campaign that day and the phone began to ring at Masterpiece Cake Shop.
“They were in at about 4:30 (p.m.) that Thursday. A half hour after the men left, I answered the phone,” Phillips said. “The caller asked if I had just turned away a gay couple. I said ‘no, I just turned down making a wedding cake.’ A half a dozen more hateful calls came in before we closed the store at 6 (p.m.).”
That was the beginning. The calls continued all day Friday, Saturday, into the next week and beyond for months. Most were hostile and angry; some were threatening and scary.
Soon there were protesters in the parking lot with signs. Next, the ACLU filed a complaint against Phillips with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
Phillips’ lawyers argued the First Amendment protected his free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of association. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled Phillips in violation of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. The commission ordered him to change the store’s policy and subject its employees to sensitivity training. The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the ruling.
Phillips said he could not change his policy without violating his Christian beliefs, so he stopped baking wedding cakes.
“Wedding cakes comprised about 40 percent of our business, and we’ve given that up,” Phillips said. “I had 10 employees on payroll, and now I have four including me. It has cost me the opportunity to pay those people, to make wedding cakes and do what I love to do.”
In explaining the Civil Rights Commission’s decision against Phillips’ First Amendment rights, Commissioner Diann Rice said “freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust…”
Phillips took offense.
“My father was a World War II veteran who won a purple heart and who helped liberate prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp,” Phillips said. “He wrote about the smell and the horrors of war. It is so absurd, it is crazy, for her to compare the free exercise of religion to the Holocaust.”
After the Civil Rights Commission punished Phillips, a Christian customer asked several bakers in the metro area to design a cake with a biblical message that opposed same-sex marriage. When several requests were declined, he filed a complaint with the Civil Rights Commission. It ruled against him and in favor of the bakers.
“Basically, the commission said there was no probable cause for a finding of discrimination because the bakers would serve this customer in any other way but they were offended by the nature of his request,” Tedesco said. “Well, that is exactly what Jack has said all along. He would serve these gentlemen anytime in his shop, but there were certain things he would not do. The commission is playing favorites with First Amendment rights. If the state agrees with your views, you are treated one way. if the state dislikes your view, you treated another way.”
Phillips traces his love for designing cakes to childhood, when he embraced every form of artistic expression he could find.
He grew up as one of five children in what he describes as a functional, middle-class, Baptist home. At Alameda High School in the 1970s, Phillips immersed himself in art courses and spent his study halls in art labs working on paintings, drawings and honing his pottery skills.
After graduation in 1974, Phillips took a job across the street from his family’s home at a wholesale bakery that employed three of his siblings. Working his way up to cake design, he fell in love with the format.
“Jack is an artist who uses cake as his canvas,” Tedesco said. “He is no different than any artist who uses a brush and a regular canvas. Nobody has freedom if the government tells us what we can and cannot express on canvass.”
Working at the wholesale bakery for almost 20 years, Phillips never let go of a dream.
“I loved working in a bakery,” Phillips said. “I decided I wanted to own my own bakery. I would do cake decorating, combining the art and the baking that I loved so much.”
Phillips saved portions of his wages while providing for his wife to homeschool their three kids. He saved enough to buy commercial baking machines and to open Masterpiece Cake Shop in 1993. The store celebrated its 24th anniversary on Sept. 3.
“I love everyone who comes into my shop — gay, straight, black, white,” Phillips said. “It is crazy I find myself here now, in this circumstance. I’m not fighting this so I can get back in the wedding cake business. It is to protect all of our freedoms.”
It’s pathetic knowing that, as a country we have sunken this low to were we are going to the S.C. over a friggin cake and a gay couple.
PATHETIC.
Yes it is sad that we are at this point.
I am apprehensive of the outcome. With five out of nine justices fully supportive of homosexual marriage, will those same five decide that you have to bake the wedding cake for the “marriage”??? That somehow it violates civil rights for a homosexual if you decline?? That’s a key legal issue here.
Well, the citizens can rest assured that the Chief Justice knows right from wrong.
Well, they voted telling us we HAD to purchase health insurance. So I’m not to optimistic. Pretty soon they will rule we have to purchase everything from government approved stores that only sell government approved items.
And we will have let it happen.
This is all about warfare of tbe homo mafia against Christianity, nothing more. The homos wouldn’t dare do the same to a muslim baker.
And we all know how Ginzberg, Breyer, Latina, and Lesbo will vote.
The only question is how that traitor Kennedy will vote.
When Beelzebub takes Vader Ginsberg by the hand to lead her to her reward, a non-homosexualist will takes her place. Hopefully...
It was against the legal definition of marriage in the state at the time and farcical/homofascist for him to be prosecuted.
The day is coming when you will be sued for denying the advances of a non-heterosexual.
For the record lawyers are permitted to turn down clients.
Not so photographer or cake bakers or other contracted proprietors.
How queer it all is.
I am of the opinion that most if not all of these type scenarios are set up by the Gaystapo. Their intention is to legitimize their sodomy at least at the societal level.
IMHO if a queer couple get refused a service they request no matter the reason given by the proprietor, the only time the queers have a legitimate beef is if there is no other place around that provides the same service. If they can go elsewhere, they should.
It pains me to say this, but I really dislike that statement. The purple heart has also been called “I forgot to duck” medal. Meaning they were wounded in the service to out country. Thank you. But how does being wounded thru no fault of yours make what you say right?
And since I never received a purple heart even after being under enemy fire, I guess that means my opinion counts less.
Remember JFK, John Forbes Kerry, he won 3 purple hearts.
You forgot the sarcasm tag.
I just do not see how anyone can force an individual to do business with them, on any basis.
- Isn’t that slavery?
And nobody is denying anyone a wedding cake, gay or not. They can go to another baker, and I am positive there are literally thousands of bakers who would love their business, but they insist on this particular baker?
Sounds like harassment and it sounds like someone’s religious rights are being denied and bullied.
There is no constitutional right to a wedding cake, nor is there a constitutional right to never being offended.
-However
There is a constitutional right to freedom of religion.
SC better get this one right.
Another issue is government falsey assuming it has the authority to force citizens into entering a contractural relationship against their will. If they have that authority. . can they not also determine at what price?. . .if any price?. .i.e. slavery?
Notice how the Left PROMISED us that gay marriage wouldn’t affect straight people, at least directly.
They’ve moved on from that now - now that they got what they want. Big lesson for the GOPe who wanted to ‘get this issue behind us’. The Left NEVER stops attacking, regardless of what you give them.
“When Beelzebub takes Vader Ginsberg by the hand to lead her to her reward, a non-homosexualist will takes her place. Hopefully...”
Well, I just hope “Beelzebub” get’s busy soon. This little wizened up piece of skin needs to be off on her trip to Hell sooner rather than later. My “vision” of the SCOTUS is a “Conservative Seven,” with the “wise Latrina and the Fat Yenta Queer sitting there unable to do anything in the furtherance of their Commie agenda for the rest of their hopefully foreshortened lives.
Obamacare is the manifestation of your fears. That horse left the barn a few years ago.
Tell me, again, that all registered democrats should not be gassed, as a eugenic measure, to save Western civilization. If we are going to be convicted of being Nazis, based on our failure to vote for a democrat, we might as well act like them.
If they can force you to buy insurance(or fine), then they can force you to make a cake for pervs.
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