Pray for an increase in understanding and forbearance for those with differing views from your own. To understand some of the deeper issues at stake in the Jack Phillips case, pray through our prayer guide, An Unholy Matrimony. Click HERE for a free download.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. (Ex 20:16)

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Vox may still be keeping up its risible just-the-facts posturing, but it is tendentious to the point of dishonesty: “Colorado baker who refused to serve gay couple now wants to refuse to serve transgender person,” it says.

That is not true, of course. (But everybody knows that.)

Phillips serves customers of all sorts, including homosexual customers. What he declines to do is to make cakes for certain events, participation in which, even as a vendor, would violate his conscience. As he put it: “I serve everybody. It’s just that I don’t create cakes for every occasion.”

Phillips has been prosecuted under a civil-rights law, but this is not really a case about civil rights: It is a case about compulsion.

After winning his case at the Supreme Court, Phillips was again targeted by Colorado activists, one of whom asked him to make a cake to celebrate coming out as transgender. Phillips declined, and was ordered to the state to compulsory mediation. He is countersuing….

This all began with the best of intentions….

Sexual minorities have faced their share of discrimination, too. President Lyndon Johnson, at the very moment he was positioning himself as a civil-rights champion, described homosexuality as a “sickness and disease.” The public-accommodations burden did not lie quite so heavily on homosexuals as it did on African Americans, if only because a gay man could buy a train ticket or rent a hotel room without announcing his sexuality. But just as black Americans had their “Green Book,” a catalogue of restaurants and hotels open to them, gay Americans also had their guides to safe and friendly places, the first of which was published in that very busy year, 1964….

The same cannot be said of Jack Phillips and his little bakery. No gay couple seeking a wedding cake is going to have to travel three states away to find one if Phillips declines their custom. No transgender person celebrating a coming out is going to want for baked goods if Phillips refuses service.

Everybody knows this. The activists targeting Phillips do not care. The point is not to see to it that gay and transgender people can live their lives as they wish to — the point is to coerce Jack Phillips into conformity….

Liberalism has always struggled to balance the protection of minority rights against majoritarian institutions and — less often appreciated — the protection of individual rights. The American Left has liberated itself from such considerations by abandoning liberalism for identity politics and a might-makes-right ethic. Why compel Jack Phillips to knuckle under? Because you can, and because you hate him. Hate is an inescapable part of tribalism, and hate is now the single most important organizing principle of the American Left….  (Excerpts from Kevin D. Williamson article in National Review. Click to read this thoughtful article in its entirety.)