Earlier this week, the Colorado Supreme Court dissected a case to decide whether the conservative-owned bakery Masterpiece Cakeshop broke the law against discrimination by turning down a transgender woman’s request for a pink-and-blue cake. When Masterpiece Cakeshop found out that a cake with pink and blue icing would commemorate a gender transition, they declined to proceed with the customer and denied services.
The Christian-owned cake shop is also infamously known for the Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips, which determined that Phillips was entitled to refuse a homosexual couple a wedding cake due to his “sincerely held religious beliefs.”
In addition to that ongoing case, trans lawyer Autumn Scardina requested the cake shop’s services in 2017, hoping to purchase a cake with simple pink and blue icing to celebrate her gender transition. Scardina shared with Them back in 2021 that, had she not specified that the cake would also commemorate her gender transition, Masterpiece would have accepted her order. Rather, she said, a manager abruptly became “very hostile,” informed her that the cake would go against the store’s religious convictions, and then hung up on her.
The jury allegedly conjectured that Masterpiece could not have understood the importance of Scardina’s blank cake until she disclosed it, raising doubts about Phillips’ true intentions. When the justices reportedly questioned the attorneys from both sides on how a bakery could uphold Colorado’s anti-discrimination legislation even if it refused to bake a cake without a written statement and only icing, they cited the statute that no “place of public accommodation” may “refuse, withhold from, or deny (…) the full and equal enjoyment” of their goods and services.
According to the Associated Press, Justice Melissa Hart told Phillips’ lawyer Jake Warner that Masterpiece would have delivered an identical cake if it was intended to celebrate the birth of twins. “It’s only when the cakes get into the home of the consumer that they take on the message,” she told the press. “They are the same cake. It’s all a pink cake with blue icing.” She also questioned Phillips about whether he would have turned down a request for a white cake with white icing from a client who claimed that the cake similarly symbolized their transition. Phillips said that it would be “lacking the symbolism,” which was “not as clearly in the cake” as Scardina’s pink-and-blue request.
In 2021, state district Judge A. Bruce Jones granted Scardina’s case against Masterpiece and Phillips, citing Masterpiece’s actions as “a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy” and fining the company $500, the highest amount allowed under Colorado’s anti-discrimination legislation. In 2023, a state court of appeals upheld the ruling. Phillips is now requesting that the state Supreme Court reverse that ruling, claiming that the laws infringe upon his right to free speech.
“It’s not about Masterpiece Cakeshop, Mr. Phillips, or his religious beliefs. As a Christian myself, I value him for his beliefs, and I pray for him,” Scardina tells Them when interviewed in 2021. “But I don’t think the law can accommodate individuals sidestepping secular law based on your own internal religious belief.” And even sympathizing with Philips, she says, “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.”
