CO: We Will Never Stop Hearing About This Dumb Baker and His Gay Cakes
Jack Phillips will make a pink cake with blue frosting, but not for a transgender person.
by Evan Urquhart
History’s most annoying news story is back, but this time it’s trans. Bigoted baker Jack Phillips speaks through his cakes, and what he says is “I hate the LGBTQ+ community and I’m never letting it go.” Phillips and his cakes rose to prominence after he refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple in 2012. The state of Colorado agreed that this violated protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation in its constitution, but the United States Supreme Court narrowly ruled Colorado was targeting Phillips for his religion, while indicating that non-discrimination measures protecting same-sex married couples were probably mostly okay. Of course that was the old Supreme Court, which legalized same-sex marriage, and not the new Supreme Court, which struck down Roe v Wade.
Anyway, like the seemingly endless sequels for mediocre movie franchises, Phillips’ discriminatory cake-baking business practices keep on returning to the news. Today, a Colorado appeals court has once again ruled against Phillips. This case concerns a pink cake with blue frosting that, the court found, Phillips agreed to make until he found out it was for a trans woman who wanted to celebrate her gender transition. Only then did he say no.
screenshot from ABC News
In the Daily Citizen, a conservative Christian news site associated with Focus on the Family, Phillips is lionized as a “quiet, humble” baker who is being attacked by LGBTQ+ people who want to buy cakes from him. Phillips, they explain, does “not feel he could use his creative talents to express a message he believes to be false,” the message in question being “pink cake, blue frosting.”
Of course, that’s not how the Christian right views things. In fact, the Daily Citizen article directly responded to the court’s objection that, because Phillips had agreed to make the cake before he knew the client was transgender, that he was refusing to serve her because she is transgender. Try to follow this logic:
screenshot from the Daily Citizen
The defense of Phillips does have a disturbing aspect, in addition to a dumb one, of course. If making a pink cake with blue frosting expresses an affirmative approval of “transgenderism” what about renting a transgender person a house where they may decide to fly a trans rights flag? Is the house then participating in the affirmative approval of transgenderism? What if the house with a trans rights flag catches on fire? Would a Christian firefighter be allowed a religious exemption from putting the fire out, because to do so participate in the approval of transgenderism? What about serving transgender people food, or seating them at restaraunts. If participating in commerce with someone is the same as speech approving of everything they do in their lives, then surely all non-discrimination laws would go against freedom of religion and/or freedom of speech?
This might seem over the top, but conservatives are ideologically opposed non-discrimination laws in the first place. While they might find it inconvenient to admit it openly, that sort of obviously evil place, where businesses can refuse service based on hate, is exactly where they hope all this will go. Jack Phillips and his dumb cakes may be something no one cares about and no one ever wants to hear about again, but his is just one of many dumb cases that they hope will be the thin end of the wedge for ending all protections against discrimination for all people in the U. S.