Can The Left Please Just Leave Jack Phillips Alone?
by Bradley Polumbo
Sunday, August 19, 2018
I’m sick of talking about cake. I hoped that after the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop, the now infamous case where a Christian baker refused to design a custom cake for a same-sex wedding, we’d be done with the topic.
Wrong. The Court ruled 7-2 in favor of the baker, Jack Phillips, on the narrow grounds that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission which originally ruled against him for refusing to bake the cake demonstrated unconstitutional religious animus. This ruling didn’t really solve the broader issue of whether religious exemptions allow business owners to refuse service ( they should), but we all hoped it would at least settle the cake-debate.
Yet apparently the Left can’t handle a loss. Last week, the news broke that the same baker in Colorado is back in federal court, this time for refusing to bake a cake celebrating a transgender person’s gender transition. It’s no coincidence that the person seeking this cake contacted Phillips (there are plenty of other bakers in Colorado), and made sure to mention that the cake was specifically meant for a gender transition celebration. The customer knew that, like most religious people, Phillips views gender as innate, God-given and biological, not fungible or transitional, and that baking such a cake would violate his beliefs.
Regardless of your views on trans issues, the reality remains that this latest cake-related development is obviously a deliberate attempt by the Left to antagonize a random Christian baker who got caught up in a civil-liberties brouhaha.
After all, when the original cake controversy first happened, the Left nearly ran Phillips out of business. The Christian baker, who regularly does charity work for the homeless and welcomes all people into his store for most everyday services, lost 40 percent of his business after the original Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruling forced him to either violate his deeply-held beliefs against same-sex marriage (which I don’t share—but that shouldn’t matter) or stop making wedding cakes, a crucial part of his business. This forced him to fire 60 percent of his staff, and he was barely able to keep his bakery open. The store started to receive threatening phone calls… all over a cake, that the gay couple in question could have gotten almost anywhere else.
Is this really the best way to promote LGBT tolerance? I, along with many young conservatives, am pro-gay marriage, but that doesn’t give us the right to trample over those whose disagree, and that’s certainly not the way to convince them to join us.
The Left needs to realize this. When they launch an assault on people of faith for anti-gay marriage views or traditional definitions of gender, in the long run, they’re engaging in a self-defeating tactic. Trying to force people to embrace your ideas only brings about more resistance.
Frankly, this latest development is just bizarre. Who celebrates gender transitions with cake? Beyond that, what kind of person would purposely seek out the one baker they know can’t bake that cake without violating their religious beliefs, and try to use a court to force them to bake it anyway?
If the Left really wants to create a tolerant society, it has to be one where we tolerate those who disagree with us. Gay people have every right to get married, and every right to eat cake. Transgender people should transition if they wish, and if they really want a cake, should have that as well. But Christians have the right to be Christian too. If liberals use the courts to tramp over their political opponents, that sets the precedent for them to get trampled on next time around.
Antagonists on the Left need to relax, and eat some cake from any of the other bakeries in Colorado. Then we can finally stop talking about this dessert disaster. |
