Tolerance Is a 2-Way Street!

• Christian Baker's Lawyers File Opening Brief With Supreme Court: Tolerance Is a 2-Way Street
• ( click the above link for the whole article)
• 
  

Lawyers representing Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop filed their opening brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, arguing that tolerance is a two-way street.

"Tolerance should be a two-way street. Phillips gladly serves anyone who walks into his store, but, as is customary practice for many artists, he declines opportunities to design for a variety of events and messages that conflict with his deeply held beliefs. In this case, Jack told the couple suing him he'd sell them anything in the store but just couldn't design a custom cake celebrating their wedding because of his Christian faith," said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Kristen Waggoner in a statement Thursday.

"The First Amendment protects Jack's right to create artistic expression that is consistent with his core convictions. Individuals can support both same-sex marriage and Jack, and people should have the right to disagree on critical matters of conscience.

"The same government that can force Jack to violate his faith and conscience can force any one of us to do the same."...

• Christian Baker Jack Phillips Responds to Being Compared to Nazis in the Holocaust
• ( Click the above link for the whole article)

..."That was particularly offensive to me," Phillips said of the commissioner's words, explaining that his dad was a soldier in World War II who landed in Omaha Beach at Normandy and ended up being part of the group that liberated Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp Germany.

"I don't have the vocabulary for it but for someone to compare trying to live by your faith to the person who brought on the Holocaust or to slave owners it's just — it's insulting. It's ridiculous. I don't have the word for it, but it's wrong," he told The Daily Signal.

..."My situation has nothing to do with the Nazis. It has nothing to do with racism. I want to run my bakery in a way everyone who comes in is welcome. I don't care what their political persuasions are. God created lots of people. He created every one of them. And He wants us to show His love to them," he added.

In an interview with The Christian Post in 2014, Phillips said he felt as though his constitutional rights were being subverted.

"My First Amendment rights protect my freedom of religion and my freedom of speech. The Supreme Court generally rules that art is speech, and in that way they are trying to take away two of my primary constitutional rights," Phillips said.

He added, "My faith in Jesus Christ comes before my need to bake cakes for a living, and if I have to close down the bakery and pursue another line of work, I would do that before I would compromise my faith."