Tea at Trianon: Another Frivolous Lawsuit

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 13, 2019

Another Frivolous Lawsuit

It should be obvious that suing Jack Philips is sheer harassment and is making a mockery of our legal system. From The Federalist:

If a long Struggle Session couldn’t break Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cake Shop, I doubt another frivolous lawsuit will do the trick. Then again, the campaign to destroy Phillips’s business was never merely about punishing a single man for refusing to submit to prevailing leftist orthodoxy. It was also a warning to all would-be apostates that thought crimes could lead to fiscal ruin, public denunciation, and endless harassment. In that sense, the prosecution has probably already paid off.

Courts won’t put to rest the cultural debate over social issues. But it’s worth noting that it wasn’t howling protesters but the state-empowered Colorado Civil Rights Commission that attempted to destroy Phillips’s business when he refused to design a specialty cake for David Mullins and Charlie Craig’s gay wedding ceremony in 2012—before gay marriage was even legalized in Colorado or recognized by federal courts.

Even today, after getting it wrong for so long, mainstream news outlets like to report that Phillips refused “to bake a wedding cake” or denied a gay couple “service.” Phillips, however, didn’t query his customers about their sexual preferences or their preferred pronouns, nor did he bar anyone from purchasing any products made in his shop, a place of public accommodation. No, Colorado had attempted to compel a citizen to say something he didn’t believe.

After years of fiscal and personal struggles, Phillips finally prevailed, but only because of a narrow Supreme Court decision that found commissioners hadn’t displayed religious neutrality and exhibited “a clear and impermissible hostility toward [his] sincere religious beliefs” when pursuing Phillips. That is a nice way of saying commissioners had compared orthodox Christians to Nazis and segregationists—because nothing says “inclusion” like comparing a genteel baker in Lakewood to murderous SS officer.

In any event, the Colorado commissioners went after Phillips only one day after SCOTUS ruled in his favor. And on June 26, 2017, the day the Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’s case, the lawyer and transgender activist Autumn Scardina called Masterpiece Cakeshop, one of dozens of bakeries in the Denver area—there is one approximately a quarter of a mile from Masterpiece Cakeshop—and asked Phillips to design a custom cake with a blue exterior and a pink interior to symbolize a transition from male to female, or, as her lawyer now claims, her “birthday cake.” (Read more.)