Members of the Colorado Supreme Court tossed a lawsuit against baker Jack Phillips, marking the latest development in over a decade of lawfare against the Christian business owner.
Phillips, who runs Masterpiece Cakeshop, was sued twelve years ago after he refused to make a custom cake celebrating a so-called same-sex marriage because of his Christian convictions on sexual ethics. On the same day that the United States Supreme Court ruled six years ago that Colorado officials had violated his rights by claiming that he violated discrimination law in the state, an attorney called Masterpiece Cakeshop to request a custom cake to celebrate a so-called gender transition, as well as a custom cake showing Satan smoking marijuana.
That lawsuit was finally tossed by the Colorado Supreme Court because “the attorney who filed it did not follow the right process,” according to a press release from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the legal advocacy group which has represented Phillips over the past twelve years.
“Enough is enough. Jack has been dragged through courts for over a decade. It’s time to leave him alone,” Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Jake Warner remarked in the release. “In this case, an attorney demanded that Jack create a custom cake that would celebrate and symbolize a transition from male to female. Because that cake admittedly expresses a message, and because Jack cannot express that message for anyone, the government cannot punish Jack for declining to express it. The First Amendment protects that decision.”
Colorado Supreme Court Justice Melissa Hart wrote that they could not answer the question of how governments should “balance the rights” of so-called “transgender individuals to be free from discrimination in places of public accommodation with the rights of religious business owners” when they are operating in the market due to the procedural journey of the lawsuit.
The nonprofit nevertheless observed that neither the Supreme Court decision six years ago nor the dismissal of the lawsuit from the Colorado Supreme Court directly addressed whether the First Amendment right to free speech allowed Phillips to decline the obscene cake orders.