A Christian Colorado cake baker, Jack Phillips, will be back in court this week asking the state’s supreme court to protect his religious freedom to not create a cake celebrating a gender transition, the latest chapter in a legal saga that has been raging on for more than a decade. 

Mr. Phillips has been engulfed in legal battles since 2012, when he declined to make a custom cake celebrating a gay couple’s wedding. The United States Supreme Court ruled in his favor in 2018, but he’ll be back in a courtroom — this time, on the state level — on Tuesday over another clash between Colorado’s anti-discrimination law and religious freedom. 

This case — which legal observers say could also end up at the U.S. Supreme Court — stems from a transgender attorney, Autumn Scardina, asking Mr. Phillips to create a custom blue and pink gender transition celebration cake. Mr. Phillips, whose Christian faith also leads him to refuse to make Halloween cakes, or cakes with racist or profane messages, declined to make the gender transition cake. 

“For over 10 years, activists and Colorado officials have come after Jack and misused state law to threaten and punish him. This harassment must stop so Jack and every artist in Colorado can create freely and not be forced by the government to express messages that violate their beliefs,” a senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom who is representing Mr. Phillips, Jake Warner, tells the Sun. “Jack serves everyone. It always comes down to what the cake will express, never who requests it.”

A central question in the case is whether a pink and blue cake with no words on it constitutes constitutionally protected speech — after the appeals court held that it does not. 

Mr. Phillips’s attorneys are asking the Colorado court to apply a ruling last year from the U.S. Supreme Court, 303 Creative v. Elenis, holding that the First Amendment prevented Colorado from forcing a website designer to create designs that she didn’t believe in. 

“Phillips has suffered enough,” Mr. Phillips’s attorneys write in a brief. “The State’s past prosecutions prompted death threats and vandalism and cost Phillips six years of his life, a significant part of his business, and most of his employees — harms that endure even though he eventually won those cases. He’s now been in courts defending his freedom for over a decade. This crusade against Phillips must stop.”

Mr. Phillips’s attorneys argue that the gender transition cake request was a “setup.” 

“Years before, Scardina emailed Phillips twice — calling him a ‘bigot’ and a ‘hypocrite,’” his brief notes, adding that “Scardina sought to ‘correct’ the ‘errors of [Phillips’] thinking.’” 

The Sun has reached out to Ms. Scardina. The American Civil Liberties Union, opposing Mr. Phillips, says he “agreed to make the cake before Ms. Scardina revealed that she intended to use it to celebrate her transgender status,” and that he would make a similar blue and pink cake for other customers. 

“Mr. Phillips also agreed that the pink and blue cake had no inherent meaning and didn’t express any message,” the ACLU of Colorado’s legal director, Tim Macdonald, tells the Sun. “The bakery’s refusal was based not on any message that the cake communicated but on the fact that the customer sought to use the cake to celebrate her transgender identity.”

He adds that refusing to sell a transgender person a product because of objections to their use of the product is discrimination. 

“By refusing to sell Ms. Scardina a cake to celebrate her birthday and gender transition,” Mr. Macdonald says, “the bakery and Mr. Phillips violated the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act.”