Who Is Jack Phillips?

My VIP for this week is Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado. He “has been targeted for refusing to make cakes celebrating same-sex marriage and transgender transitions,” according to Blaze News. The article continued: 

A Christian cake baker has finally defeated legal harassment from the LGBTQ+ movement after fighting in court for more than a decade.

Jack Philips was sued in 2012 for refusing to create a cake for a same-sex couple at his Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado and then later sued for refusing to create a cake celebrating a transgender transition. Attorneys for the Alliance Defending Freedom have defended Phillips for 12 years…

On Tuesday the Colorado Supreme Court dismissed the second lawsuit after saying that the attorney who filed the lawsuit did not follow the proper process to do so. Phillips won the first lawsuit in 2018 after a court found that officials acted with hostility against his faith.

Neither of the legal victories established Phillips’ constitutional right to free speech as a basis for dismissal.

The court’s decision leaves open the possibility that Phillips will be sued again. Until a court is willing to rule on a constitutional basis for free speech, Phillips and people who take a similar stand for freedom of religion and freedom of speech could face court cases. Kelsey Dallas at The Deseret News agreed with me. 

The Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in favor of Phillips left the door open for additional legal challenges, since it didn’t answer overarching questions about what should win out when religious freedom protections conflict with nondiscrimination protections for members of the LGBTQ community.

Instead, the ruling was focused on Colorado officials’ treatment of the Colorado baker. The court ruled 7-2 that officials had been unlawfully hostile about Phillips’ religious beliefs.

The Supreme Court again ruled in favor of a religious business owner in June 2023 in a case called 303 Creative. But that decision also didn’t fully resolve conflict over Phillips’ cakes, since it focused on business owners’ free speech rights and didn’t clearly define what types of products should be seen as expressive.

Nevertheless, Phillips’ attorney team felt that the 303 Creative ruling supported the Colorado baker’s position in the gender transition cake battle and kept fighting for that case to be dismissed, as it now has been.

Like the Supreme Court in 2018, the Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday did not address key questions about balancing LGBTQ rights with religious freedom.

If and when other cases such as that of Phillips or 303 Creative reaches the Supreme Court, I expect that the high court will eventually rule on the constitutionality of such cases. It seems reasonable to me that a freedom guaranteed by the Bill Rights carries more weight than a more recent “right.” However, I have no legal training and could be wrong!