Commentary
It’s the tenth year of litigation for Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker whose Christian belief that marriage is between one man and one woman means he declines to design custom wedding cakes for same-sex unions. Or rather, it’s the tenth year of his persecution as a Christian by militantly secular powers-that-be both public and private.
In June 2018, six years after the wedding-cake dispute began in 2012, he won a partial victory in the U.S. Supreme Court overturning a ruling by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and in turn the Colorado state courts, that his refusal violated the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act, which forbids businesses open to the public to decline service to people on the basis of, among other things, their gender and sexual orientation. The high court ruled 7–2 that statements by one of the commissioners during the proceedings comparing Phillips’s beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust evidenced a hostility to his faith impermissible under the First Amendment’s guarantee of “free exercise” of religion. Philips was lucky: If that commissioner hadn’t shot her mouth off, he might have lost his Supreme Court case….