Democrats in Minnesota and nationwide are switching into enforcement mode.
The legal persecution of Jack Phillips continues…
Phillips’s public expression of his faith had placed a target on his back, and the narrow Supreme Court ruling in his favor had the two-pronged effect of further inflaming activists while simultaneously depriving the baker of decisive, precedent-setting protections against their agitations. In 2017, “the very day the Supreme Court agreed to hear Phillips’s case, Autumn Scardina, a transgender activist in Denver, called Masterpiece Cakeshop and requested a custom cake with a blue exterior and a pink interior to symbolize a gender transition,” David Harsanyi wrote. Scardina was allegedly a member of the Church of Satan, and court documents alleged the activist had also sought Phillips’s services for charming depictions such as a cake celebrating Satan’s birthday, which would feature “a large figure of Satan, licking a 9″ black Dildo,” with the requirement that the dildo must necessarily be “an actual working model that can be turned on before we unveil the cake.”
Phillips, of course, politely declined Scardina’s requests. Scardina, of course, proceeded to file a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The commission, of course, ruled against Phillips. In August 2018, two months after his initial Masterpiece Cakeshop victory, Phillips was back in court.
Last week, a panel for the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld an earlier court decision requiring Phillips to bake Scardina’s transgender cake. No surprise there — the same court had also upheld the state’s original injunction demanding that Phillips bake the same-sex wedding cake. What should be abundantly clear at this point is that “civil rights,” in this context, are more about power — wielded against disfavored groups, and in favor of privileged ones — than any neutral conception of legal protection. Even as it ruled against Phillips, the Commission upheld the right of bakers to refuse to make a Bible-shaped cake inscribed with the message: “Homosexuality is a detestable sin. Leviticus 18:2.” This double standard is a feature, not a bug, of how these bureaucracies function. As NR’s editors noted today, the practical effect of the Left’s weaponization of anti-discrimination laws “is to demand that the faithful kneel before favored identity groups.”
…and is so hamfistedly symbolic that a sophomore-year English prof would send it back for rewrite if it were fiction.
The process is the punishment.
Of course, the MNDFL does its darnedest to make it difficult, even impossible, to run as a Republican. I’ve heard more than one GOP legislator who’d been pondering running for higher office without having spent their teens and twenties as cloistered monks say they were going to demur on running , because the DFL’s opposition research crowd would make not only their lives, but their family’s, a living hell.
WIth that in mind?
Keith Ellison is going to show Scott Jenson that running against the DFL has consequences. Via David Strom:
…the Attorney General of the State of Minnesota has taken it upon himself to step up the harassment of Dr. Jensen based upon already adjudicated charges that should never have been brought in the first place. It is disgraceful and can be explained by nothing other than politics.
It is a political hit job–punishment not for what he has done, or even said, but for who he is. A well-respected Republican who dared to challenge Tim Walz in the last election. They are sending a message that taking on the Democrat establishment will ruin your life.
I said above that the process is the punishment. At some point, the determination that he may continue to conduct medicine will not exonerate him, nor return the time, effort, and money that he has to spend to defend himself. They have turned him into a doctor who has faced 5 investigations. How many potential patients will avoid him for that alone? Countless.
No matter how bogus the charges are, the punishment has taken place simply by making the charges and forcing him to defend himself.
Politics ain’t beanbag, and it is usual for people in the midst of campaigns to hurl charges at each other. But this goes way beyond that. They are mobilizing all the power of the state to destroy Jensen.
This is what tyranny looks like in America.
When all your oppoonent cares about is gaining and consolidating power, “democracy” is just a decorative verbal sprig of parsley on top of whatever horrors our new Leninists are hoiking up.
