The Colorado Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit filed against Jack Phillips after he refused to bake a cake celebrating a gender transition.
In a 6-3 opinion, the court threw out the lawsuit on procedural grounds, asserting that the plaintiff, Autumn Scardina, did not exhaust all options to seek redress in the case through another court before the lawsuit.
“We express no view on the merits of these claims,” Justice Melissa Hart wrote for the majority.
Scardina filed the initial lawsuit against Phillips in 2017 after his bakery refused to create Scardina a blue cake with pink frosting to commemorate a gender transition.
Phillips is the same baker who was at the focal point of a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the majority ruled that Phillips did not have to make a wedding cake for a gay couple that would have violated his freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Scardina went to Phillips’s bakery on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court decided it would hear Phillips’s case. Scardina said she wanted to prove that Phillips would deny serving LGBT on any grounds but denied that the move was grounds for setting up litigation.
Scardina filed a complaint against Phillips with the state and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which found that Phillips was likely at fault for refusing to bake the cake — considering that it did not require any writing on it indicating a celebration of a gender transition.
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Scardina’s lawyer filed the lawsuit, but it was dropped in 2019 as part of a settlement between Phillips and the state, which Scardina was not a part of.
Justices said Scardina should have taken Phillips’s settlement to the state’s court of appeals. However, instead, the case went to a state judge who ruled in 2021 that Phillips violated the state’s anti-discrimination law. The judge said it was not about protecting free speech but that Phillips refused to sell a product.