Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cake Shop
Do you remember the Colorado cake shop that was ordered by an administrative law judge, Robert N. Spencer (of whom I cannot find any info or a pic), to bake a wedding cake for two homosexuals or face fines, even though doing so violates the owner’s Christian religious beliefs?
In an interview with FoxNews’s Elisabeth Hasselbeck, cake maker Jack Phillips said he’d rather shut down his business and go to jail than compromise his beliefs: “[I’ll serve jail time if] that’s what it takes. It’s not like I have chosen this team or that team. This is who I am, it’s what I believe.”
Kirsten Andersen reports for LifeSiteNews:
“Does becoming a business owner mean you have to check your convictions at the door?” Hasselbeck asked. “Why is it important for you to have a business and not have to abandon personal religious beliefs just to make a buck?”
“I don’t plan on giving up my religious beliefs … I don’t feel that I should participate in their wedding, and when I do a cake, I feel like I’m participating in the ceremony or the event or the celebration that the cake is for,” Phillips said. “My priorities would be towards my faith rather than towards my safety or security.”
Phillips, who owns Masterpiece Cakeshop in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, has been under fire since July 2012, when David Mullins and Charlie Craig filed a discrimination complaint after Phillips refused to sell them a wedding cake.
While Colorado’s constitution states, “Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as marriage in this state,” Mullins and Craig had nonetheless planned to “marry” in Massachusetts, where a court order made same-sex “marriage” legal in 2004. Afterward, they planned to hold a reception in Colorado. When they visited Phillips’ cake shop to ask him to provide a wedding cake for the event, he declined, explaining that his religious beliefs prevented him from participating in same-sex “weddings.” Phillips said he would be happy to sell them brownies or other treats to serve at the reception, just not a wedding cake.
The two men reacted with angry disbelief. “It was the most awkward, surreal, very brief encounter,” Mullins told Denver Westword at the time. “We got up to leave, and to be totally honest, I said, ‘F— you and your homophobic cake shop.’ And I may or may not have flipped him off.”
After the two men departed Phillips’s business, they filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission with the help of the ACLU, arguing that Phillips violated the state’s anti-discrimination laws, which were expanded in 2008 to include sexual preference and gender identity.
Phillips and his lawyers have argued that the religious nature of his objection to gay “marriage” warrants an exception to the anti-discrimination law, which also names religion among its protected classes.
But on December 7, Judge Robert Spencer ruled in the gay couple’s favor, equating Phillips’s deeply held religious beliefs against gay “marriage” with racial bias. To allow Phillips to refuse to serve gay “weddings,” the judge argued, “would allow a business that served all races to nonetheless refuse to serve an interracial couple because of the business owner’s bias against interracial marriage.”
Wrote Spencer, “it may seem reasonable that a private business should be able to refuse service to anyone it chooses. This view, however, fails to take into account the cost to society and the hurt caused to persons who are denied service simply because of who they are.”
The judge also rejected Phillips’s argument that he was simply obeying the state constitution by refusing to recognize a same-sex relationship as “marriage.”
“Although [Phillips and his lawyers] are correct that Colorado does not recognize same-sex marriage,” wrote Spencer, “that fact does not excuse discrimination based upon sexual orientation.”
Phillips’s attorney, Nicolle Martin, told the Associated Press that Spencer’s decision was “reprehensible” and “antithetical to everything America stands for. [Jack Phillips] can’t violate his conscience in order to collect a paycheck. If Jack can’t make wedding cakes, he can’t continue to support his family. And in order to make wedding cakes, Jack must violate his belief system.”
Martin says her client has not ruled out an appeal.
Steve Jalsevac of LifeSiteNews.com has this message for us:
Denver cake baker Jack Phillips is showing Christians and others with beliefs that cannot support same-sex “marriage” what they must do in response to bullying by gay activists. Resist. Far too few have been doing this and that is why militant homosexualism has been advancing so very rapidly in destroying the family, our traditional, family supportive sexual culture and freedoms of expression and religious freedoms.
Then there is Phil Kline, another hero who has also been a victim of repeated, gross injustices, from what one might call the abortion mafia. And yet, he persists and persists, when most would have given up years ago.
Such heroes should be receiving strong moral and financial support from the public. They are doing what the natural leaders are mostly all too afraid to do. These heroes are acting on behalf of all of us and perhaps paving the way for mass public rejection of the new, corrupt social order.
Do you have the courage of your convictions? You do?
Then do something to help Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop!
1. Do you live in or near Denver? Then go and buy something at Masterpiece Cakeshop:
Address: 3355 S Wadsworth Blvd, Ste H-117, Lakewood, CO 80227 (click here for directions)
Phone: (303) 763-5754
2. Write a positive review for Masterpiece Cakeshop:
- On Google Review: click here
- On Yelp: click here
3. Go to “We Support Masterpiece Cakeshop” on Facebook and tell Phillips you support him!
~Eowyn
