Denver Church Responds to Wedding Cake Case With Inclusive Message

A Denver church has responded in a loving, uplifting way to the Supreme Court's decision last week to side with a Lakewood, Colo., baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.

The sign at South Broadway Christian Church in Denver currently reads, "Jesus would have baked that cake," according to local TV station KUSA.

The court, in a narrowly constructed 7-2 ruling last week, found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in sanctioning baker Jack Phillips, failed to give his religious beliefs appropriate consideration.

Regarding his decision to post an inclusive message on the church sign, Pastor Dustin Adkins told KUSA, "Jesus worked with folks on the periphery of society, mistreated and marginalized. Those folks are the ones he welcomes the most."

Writing the majority opinion for the court in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd, v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, "To Phillips, his claim that using his artistic skills to make an expressive statement, a wedding endorsement in his own voice and of his own creation, has a significant First Amendment speech component and implicates his deep and sincere religious beliefs."

He added that Phillips "was entitled to a neutral and respectful consideration of his claims in all the circumstances of the case."

But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote the dissenting opinion, argued that Philips indeed discriminated against the couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins, based purely on their sexual orientation.

Phillips made the case that he also doesn't bake Halloween cookies based on his religious beliefs but Ginsburg argued that Craig and Mullins simply wanted a cake and not "a not a cake celebrating heterosexual weddings or same-sex weddings."

"What matters is that Phillips would not provide a good or service to a same-sex couple that he would provide to a heterosexual couple," Ginsburg wrote.