Jack Phillips is not a baker, but a cake artist. He is a creative professional who invests himself in his work. Before a legal ruling forced Jack to decide to stop making wedding cakes altogether, he would meet with a couple and listen to their story in order to craft a wedding cake specifically for them. Jack is a Christian who sees a wedding cake as representing the sacred union of one man and one woman.
In 2012 a gay couple asked Jack to bake them a wedding cake. Right away he knew he could not, so he politely told the men he would gladly sell them anything in his store but would be unable to participate in their ceremony by baking a cake that would celebrate it. Jack didn’t turn down the gay couple but a specific event in which they wanted him to be involved.
A cake for a same-sex wedding isn’t the only kind of cake Jack declines to make. He doesn’t create Halloween cakes, divorce cakes, anti-American cakes, or cakes that would insult specific groups or individuals, including members of the LGBT community.
Nevertheless, Jack was sued for violating a Colorado anti-discrimination law. Currently he has lost at every level his case has been heard, but in June of 2017, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear his case. Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Jack, as well as many other creative professionals who only want the freedom to their lives and operate their businesses according to their deeply held beliefs.
Founding Father James Madison is known as the Father of the Constitution. He declared,
Government is instituted to protect property of every sort…. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.
In the same document, Madison added,
Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a man’s house as his castle, to pay public and enforce private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title to invade a man’s conscience which is more sacred than his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature and original conditions of the social pact.
Madison essentially said, “Woe to any government that would protect the right of an individual to own a home and other tangible items, yet not protect his right to live his life according to his own conscience, his most important and sacred possession.”
James Madison essentially said, “Woe to any government that would protect the right of an individual to own a home and other tangible items, yet not protect his right to live his life according to his own conscience, his most important and sacred possession.”
Since 2012, Jack has lost 40 percent of his income and over half of his employees, simply because he is treating his deeply held beliefs, in the words of James Madison, as “the most sacred of all [his] property.”
May the Supreme Court affirm Jack’s God-given right to follow his own conscience.
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Copyright © 2017 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.