When Jack Phillips went to the Supreme Court after refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex couple’s wedding, Autumn Scardina says she empathized with him.
Scardina is a 42-year-old attorney who practices law in Colorado — the home of Phillips’ bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop — but she is also a devout Christian. Phillips claimed that his First Amendment rights precluded him from making a cake that endorsed a ceremony that violated his religious beliefs about marriage. The day after SCOTUS narrowly ruled in his favor in June 2018, he told the Today show that a wedding is an “inherently religious event and the cake is definitely a specific message.”
As a fellow believer, Scardina says she could appreciate the “nuance” of Phillips’ position. “I remember him saying several times: ‘This is about a singular religious event. This doesn’t have to do with the individuals,’” she tells them. over the phone. “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.”
Scardina called Masterpiece Cakeshop in June 2017 hoping that her good faith would be validated, but things went sour very quickly. She had a birthday coming up and decided to order a pink and blue cake to honor the date’s added significance to her: July 6 is also the anniversary of when she came out as a transgender woman. After detailing the size of the order and confirming with a representative that the bakery could fill it within that time frame, she says that she explained to a representative the “personal meaning” behind the requested design.
At that point, Scardina says that the woman taking the order “became very hostile” and immediately “shut it down.” She explained that Masterpiece would not be able to fulfill the request because it “violates their religious beliefs,” as Scardina recalls. She was in the car with her brother at the time and put the call on speaker, asking the worker to repeat what she said so he could hear. Scardina says the call was immediately disconnected.
“I’m not sure if she hung up or what happened,” she says, adding: “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.”
On Wednesday, a Denver court issued a ruling agreeing with Scardina. Judge A. Bruce Jones of the Second Judicial District dismissed the argument put forward by Phillips and his attorneys that the refusal of service to Scardina is constitutionally protected three years after she filed a lawsuit against him. He argued that the case is not about “compelled speech,” saying instead that it is about upholding nondiscrimination laws “intended to ensure that members of our society who have historically been treated unfairly… are no longer treated as ‘others.’”
Jones added that Masterpiece’s policy of serving Scardina until it became aware that she is a transgender woman is the “equivalent of a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ rule.” “LGBT individuals would be entitled to equal service only to the extent they do not request goods that reflect their identity as LGBT individuals (or at least do not inform Defendants of that reflection),” he wrote.
In addition to finding in favor of Scardina’s claim, Jones slapped Phillips with a $500 fine, the highest possible amount under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, a sweeping 2008 law protecting LGBTQ+ individuals from prejudicial bias.
Phillips’ legal team has already vowed to challenge the ruling, announcing plans to appeal in a Wednesday press release. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a right-wing law firm that also represented Phillips in his prior case before the Supreme Court, claimed in its statement that Scardina “demanded Jack create custom cakes in order to ‘test’ Jack and ‘correct the errors’ of his thinking.”
“[T]he activist even threatened to sue Jack again if the case is dismissed for any reason,” said ADF General Counsel Kristen Waggoner. “Radical activists and government officials are targeting artists like Jack because they won’t promote messages on marriage and sexuality that violate their core convictions.”
Scardina’s legal team denied that characterization of their client’s motives in bringing forward the lawsuit. Attorney Paula Greisen described Scardina as a “very loving, generous, kind person” who is “not the picture that gets painted of her.” Greisen was also the lead trial lawyer representing Charlie Craig and David Mullins, the gay couple at the center of the 2018 Supreme Court case, and says that they, too, were falsely depicted as “crazy activists.”
