Archive: The Colorado Baker Case That Pitted Religion Against Tolerance

From the TI archives — originally published in January 2015, when this case was still working its way through the Colorado courts.

In 2012, Denver-area baker Jack Phillips declined to create a custom wedding cake for a same-sex couple, citing his religious beliefs. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled against him in 2014, finding he had discriminated — a decision his attorneys, from the Alliance Defending Freedom, appealed.

Their argument: a member of the commission, Diann Rice, had shown anti-religious bias. They released an audio recording of Rice comparing Phillips's religious defense to arguments once used to defend slavery and the Holocaust — the comparison that gave this story its original headline.

The case didn't end in Colorado. In 2018, the US Supreme Court decided Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission 7–2 in Phillips's favor — not on the underlying clash between religious liberty and anti-discrimination law, which the Court left unresolved, but on the grounds that the commission had shown impermissible hostility to his religious beliefs. The bigger question the case raised is still live in American law.