Colorado baker Jack Phillips has spent more than a decade battling for his beliefs in the country’s courtrooms, but says his Christian convictions have only grown stronger.
Phillips has been a headline name for years, principally with his Supreme Court victory in 2018 when a 7-2 majority of the high court found he and his Masterpiece Cakeshop had been treated with unconstitutional hostility by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
The commission had found that Phillips had violated the civil rights of a same-sex couple who wanted him to bake a cake to celebrate their “wedding.” Phillips had refused on the grounds that his Christian beliefs would not allow him to promote gay marriage.
However, his Supreme Court victory wasn’t the end of his legal fight. A transgender attorney deliberately sought out Phillips to commission him to bake a cake to celebrate the attorney’s supposed “transition” from a man to a woman.
Phillips declined, sparking another court battle. On Oct. 8, the Colorado Supreme Court dismissed the attorney’s case against Phillips on procedural grounds, CBS News reported.
It was not the kind of sweeping victory Phillips deserved. And it might not even be the end of the endless litigation. An attorney for the plaintiff said his side is considering different legal options, according to The Denver Post.
But it was an undeniable setback for Phillips’s adversary.
And for Phillips, emerging victorious again has reaffirmed his faith.
“One of the most important things to come out of this is that it’s made my faith much stronger and drawn our family closer together and built all of our relationships with Jesus Christ,” he told Fox Digital in an article published Thursday.
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“It’s also taught me that God provides everything we need through these last days of not creating the wedding cakes and the income that’s involved in that. But He’s also given us many other opportunities.”
At a time when the beliefs of Christians are openly targeted by Democrats at all levels of government — including a federal government overseen by an ostensibly “devout Catholic” president — Smith’s refusal to surrender in the face of an unceasing onslaught should be an inspiration to every American, regardless of religious affiliation.
Phillips is proving that one individual taking a stand can make all the difference in the world.
The Founders intended the United States to be a country that guaranteed religious freedom. Phillips’s long-running battles over wedding cakes, or “transition” cakes, are one man’s assertion of that fundamental concept.
The fact that he not only is maintaining his fight but asserts that it has strengthened his convictions is an example to any American man or woman who believes in the Constitution.
Phillips has devoted years of his life — at considerable cost to his business — to standing up for the core American principle that every individual has the inalienable right to pursue religious beliefs without government interference.
His court cases have been a running affirmation that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Those are the very first words of the First Amendment to the Constitution, the opening volley of the Bill of Rights that is the miraculous birthright of every human being blessed enough to be a citizen of the country the Founders created.
That’s what Phillips is fighting for and he’s doing it against the ankle-biters of the left, who have shown no shame in their endless antagonism, or a limit to their willingness to abuse the court system to try to torment him into submission.
It’s a fight every conservative should support, regardless of religion. It’s a fight every believer should support, regardless of politics.
It’s a fight at the heart of what the ideal of the United States is and was meant to be.
Modern American leftists don’t even mask their aim to marshal the full force of the governments they control to make the country a place where coercion trumps religious conviction, but for an individual like Phillips, those odds only make his convictions stronger.
There’s a lesson in that for every American — and the Nov. 5 presidential election would be a damn fine place to start applying it.
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