Masterpiece Cakeshop Is Involved in a Lawsuit for Refusing to Bake a Trans Person’s Birthday Cake
Jack Phillips, the owner of Colorado‘s Masterpiece Cakeshop, is taking a page from fellow homophobe Kim Davis: He will just not go away. After narrowly winning his Supreme Court case over his refusal to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, he’s now suing the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC). Why? It’s all because he refused to make a Masterpiece Cakeshop trans birthday cake for a client with pink on the inside and blue on the outside.
Last year, Autumn Scardina ordered a cake from the Masterpiece Cakeshop for her birthday. While on the phone, she explained she’d like the cake to have pink cake with blue frosting, as her birthday was her “tran-iversary,” the day she came out as trans.
When Masterpiece Cakeshop refused, saying they don’t bake cakes celebrating gender transitions, she filed a complaint with the CCRC alleging discrimination.
Though Jack Phillips challenged the complaint, this June, the CCRC issued their ruling that by refusing to bake a Masterpiece Cakeshop trans cake, they’d discriminated against Scardina, violating state law. In a final twist of the knife, the CCRC’s ruling cited the Supreme Court decision.
But because he, like many right-wingers, have a persecution complex, he filed a lawsuit against Colorado’s Governor, John Hickenlooper and the CCRC, again backed by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group. The lawsuit alleges that Colorado state officials are “hostile” to his faith.
The lawsuit alleges citizens like Scardina as being “embolded by the state’s prosecution of Phillips” and “target[ing] him.” He then compares the request for a Masterpiece Cakeshop trans cake to requests for “Satanic symbols, depicting sexually explicit materials and promoting marijuana use.” He even thinks Scardina may have made some of these requests herself.
Jack Phillips is seeking financial damages “for the humiliation, emotional distress, inconvenience, and reputational damage.”
