The Colorado Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear the case of a Christian baker who refused to make a birthday cake for a transgender woman.
Jack Phillips, the owner of a Denver area bakery, won a partial victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 after refusing to make a gay couple’s wedding cake. He argued that baking the cake would violate his religious beliefs and his First Amendment right to free speech.
Autumn Scardina, a Colorado attorney and transgender woman, later sued Phillips after his bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop, refused to make a pink cake with blue frosting to celebrate her birthday and gender transition.
“It was very obvious that it wasn’t about the cake. It was about who I was as a person and how that would impact their decision on whether or not they would serve me,” Scardina told Them, an online LGBTQ magazine, in a 2021 interview.
Scardina, who is also a Christian, said she sought out Masterpiece Cakeshop for her birthday cake because she empathized with Phillips in the initial case and could appreciate the “nuance” of his argument.
“I remember him saying several times: ‘This is about a singular religious event. This doesn’t have to do with the individuals,’” Scardina told the outlet. “I disagreed with his ultimate position, but some part of me understood how difficult it must be… to watch the world change on him. I wanted to believe him.”
A Denver court sided with Scardina in 2021. District Court Judge Bruce Jones wrote in a ruling that the case is less about compelled speech than it is about upholding anti-discrimination laws “intended to ensure that members of our society who have historically been treated unfairly… are no longer treated as ‘others.’”
The Colorado Court of Appeals affirmed that decision in January, ruling that the requested cake is not a form of speech. It also found that Phillips violated Colorado’s anti-discrimination law, which makes it illegal to refuse services to people based on protected characteristics including sex.
Attorneys for Phillips appealed that decision in April and asked the state Supreme Court to take up the case in July, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that allowed a Christian web designer to refuse to create wedding websites for same-sex couples.
Jake Warner, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the conservative Christian legal group that is representing Phillips, said the Supreme Court decision should be applied to Phillips’s case to reverse the lower court’s decision. The Christian web designer, Lorie Smith, was also represented by ADF.
“Because the attorney asked Jack to create a custom cake that would celebrate and symbolize a transition from male to female, the requested cake is speech under the First Amendment,” Warner said in a news release.
“Jack works with all people and always decides whether to create a custom cake based on what message it will express, not who requests it,” Warner said.