Issues@Hand

AFA initiatives, Christian activism, news briefs

Above, Jack Phillips

July 2020 – Since 2012, Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, has been sued three times for refusing to violate his religious beliefs. The first lawsuit, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC), concerned Phillips’s refusal to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. This lawsuit made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018. The court ruled in Phillips’s favor and issued a strong rebuke against Colorado’s “clear and impermissible hostility” toward his faith.

Before that ruling, CCRC had already filed a second suit (in 2017) against Masterpiece, citing Phillips’s refusal to bake Autumn Scardina a gender-transition cake. Phillips countersued CCRC, and the second lawsuit was eventually dropped. Instead of appealing CCRC’s decision to drop her suit, Scardina personally sued Phillips in June 2019 over the same incident, requesting over $100,000 in damages because Phillips declined to bake her cake.

Representing Phillips in all three cases, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has asked that Scardina’s case be dismissed. While awaiting the court’s decision, Jack Warner, legal counsel with ADF, remarked that Scardina’s “relentless pursuit of Jack was an obvious attempt to punish him for his views, banish him from the marketplace, and financially ruin him and his shop.”

christianheadlines.com, 4/17/20; adflegal.org, 4/30/20