Baker Who Refused to Cater Same-Sex Wedding Heads to Supreme Court

Maureen Collins | June 26, 2017
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Monday morning, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the case of a Colorado baker who refused to cater a same-sex wedding. 

In 2012, Jack Phillips declined to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, who walked into his shop in Lakewood, Colo. What happened next was a nasty two-year legal battle.

After Craig and Mullins filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, the State decided that Phillips and his staff needed to comply with Colorado anti-discrimination directives and go through "re-education" procedures. Interestingly, at the time of these orders, same-sex marriage was not yet legal in Colorado. 

Phillips, along with his lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom, challenged the orders, citing his First Amendment right to free speech. In May 2014, the Colorado Supreme Court decided that cake decorating was not protected speech. Phillips and his attorneys then petitioned the Supreme Court. 

Cue the liberal media's predictable left-wing response. Upon the announcement, USA Today issued this tweet: 

This is obviously not true. The case has to do with weighing religious liberty concerns against civil rights, and the legality of same-sex marriage, as decided in the 2015 decision Obergefell v. Hodges, has nothing to do with it.

The issue of Christian Americans declining to serve same-sex weddings has come up in numerous other cases. Barronelle Stutzman, a florist in Washington state, was hit with extensive fines for not providing floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding. The same thing happened to Aaron and Melissa Klein who, like Phillips, refused to provide a cake for a same-sex wedding in Oregon. Their business was bankrupted and their professional lives destroyed thanks to a court ruling ordering them to pay tens of thousands in fines and legal fees.

This type of case was bound to get to the Supreme Court sooner or later. The highest court in the United States will hear Phillips's case in their upcoming October term.

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