Colorado baker Jack Phillips has to go to court once again after a judge sided with a transgender woman who sued him for refusing to make a cake celebrating a gender transition.
Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal group representing Phillips, vowed to appeal the judge’s decision, slamming it as yet another attack on Phillips’s right to religious freedom.
“In this case, an activist attorney demanded Jack create custom cakes in order to ‘test’ Jack and ‘correct the errors’ of his thinking, and the activist even threatened to sue Jack again if the case is dismissed for any reason,” ADF General Counsel Kristen Waggoner said in a statement. “Radical activists and government officials are targeting artists like Jack because they won’t promote messages on marriage and sexuality that violate their core convictions.”
The Colorado court’s ruling against Phillips “represents a disturbing trend: the weaponization of our justice system to ruin those with whom the activists disagree,” she added.
“We will appeal this decision and continue to defend the freedom of all Americans to peacefully live and work according to their deeply held beliefs without fear of punishment,” she said.
Judge A. Bruce Jones ruled on Wednesday that Phillips’s refusal to make a cake for left-wing activist Autumn Scardina violated Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act.
“The anti-discrimination laws are intended to ensure that members of our society who have historically been treated unfairly, who have been deprived of even the every-day right to access businesses to buy products, are no longer treated as ‘others.’ This case is about one such product—a pink and blue birthday cake—and not compelled speech,” he wrote.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted the decision, calling it blatant “religious persecution.”
Shameful. This is religious persecution. Naked & unabashed.
And it is lawless disregard of binding Supreme Court precedent. https://t.co/6vLc5zo0N5
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) June 16, 2021
