It's been four years since Colorado baker Jack Phillips won a partial Supreme Court victory after a gay couple had sought to destroy his family and his livelihood because Phillips declined to make a cake celebrating their wedding. Phillips, who regularly served gay clients including the offended couple, said that personally designing specialty cakes to celebrate events that contradict his deeply held religious convictions was something he couldn't and wouldn't do.
The gay couple had no interest in respecting Phillip's beliefs or tolerating his conscience. Instead, they sued to place the gun of government against the baker's head and compel him to meet their demands. After a protracted and expensive battle to get there, the Supreme Court agreed that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had overstepped their legal authority in severely punishing Philips for his decision to honor God.
But that has been far from the end of the story for Phillips. He has become the target of an incessant and unrelenting legal bullying campaign by LGBT revolutionaries intent on breaking him publicly. Just last week word emerged that Phillips is back in court, this time being harassed by a transgender activist named Autumn Scardina. Knowing of Phillips convictions, and that he testified in court last year that he did not believe that a person could change genders, Scardina intentionally targeted him. He called the bakery and requested a cake to celebrate his personal "gender transition" from male to female.
Phillips refused, and Scardina was ready with the lawsuit.
While obnoxious, this is hardly surprising conduct from an LGBT political movement that I've long argued is utterly disinterested in tolerating the conscience rights of those that disagree with them. While granting religious people the freedom to believe whatever they want (for now), gay activists demand they be legally restrained from practicing their beliefs outside the boundaries of their own minds.
I remember when my home state's newspaper of record, the Indy Star, began its campaign to enshrine sexual orientation and gender identity language into Indiana's non-discrimination statutes, I voiced this reality on their opinion page. The Star indignantly rejected my fears, suggesting to their readers that SOGI laws would guarantee protection for both LGBT rights and the rights of conscience.
Within a week of that editorial appearing in print, our Kentucky neighbors to the south threw clerk Kim Davis in prison for not signing her name to a gay marriage license. "Peaceful coexistence" indeed.
It always makes me wonder what people like Davis and Phillips must think when they are subjected to the one-sided rhetoric persistently emerging from a media that long ago threw all their weight behind the advancement of the progressive sexual revolution.
Despite the charade they dutifully maintain through biased coverage, this LGBT movement has never been about the right to marry. It has been about forcing the Christian clerk to give the marriage license, the Christian photographer to take the pictures, the Christian baker to make the cake, and soon the Christian minister to conduct the ceremony in the Christian church's sanctuary.
It's never really been about providing legal protections to gays and lesbians; it's about removing protections for the faithful. It's not about civil rights; it's about using the coercive power of government to obliterate the conscience rights for believers – whether they are county clerks or private cookie makers. It's not about "live and let live." It's about compelling those whose moral values contradict the spirit of the age to surrender them or be publicly stripped and shamed.
Phillips' attorneys at the organization Alliance Defending Freedom issued a statement that pretty well sums it up:
"It's one thing to be sued repeatedly; it's another to watch your family suffer harassment and face death threats, be forced to lay off longtime employees, and lose a substantial part of your business…No American should be bullied or banished from the marketplace simply for living and working consistently with their faith."
The neo-fascists who comprise the rainbow brigade disagree, and are making their move.
