Behind the issue of the cake: will freedom of religion be preserved?

Being the Left’s cause célèbre for persecuting Christians is no piece of cake.

Just ask Jack Phillips. The Colorado baker politely declined to decorate a cake for a homosexual wedding because of his Christian convictions. He offered to sell the gay couple anything else in his store.

Instead of going down the street to another baker, that couple sued in 2012. The State of Colorado joined with fines and punishments. The Left, which sees the cake as a symbol of the continued fight for Civil Rights since the 1960s, made the targeting of a simple baker a high priority for the national spotlight.

Ultimately, Jack’s legal case made its way to the Supreme Court in 2018, where the justices found that the State of Colorado violated the neutrality laws with an overt hostility towards religion. Disappointingly, they came up short on clearing up the emerging conflict between civil liberties versus free religious exercise.

Behind the matter of the cake lurks bigger questions: Will churches eventually be forced to marry homosexual couples? Will they be obligated to ordain LBGT as clergy? Will passages of the Bible be removed or changed? Will the State take over the church?

Most importantly, can Americans depend on the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of religion and prohibition against government involvement in issues of faith?

The 2020 presidential election figures in. Whoever occupies will appoint countless federal judges and Supreme Court judges that will likely settle those unsettling questions.

Jack is back — in the news and in court.

This time a transgender woman, Autumn Scardina, is suing because Phillips declined to design a cake celebrating Autumn’s transition from man to woman.

What’s obvious was voiced by Kristen Waggoner, senior vice president of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group defending Phillips. The suit is perpetrating “harassment… because he won’t create custom cakes that express messages or celebrate events in conflict with his conscience.”

“This attorney’s relentless pursuit of Jack was an obvious attempt to punish him for his views, banish him from the marketplace and financially ruin him and his shop,” Warner said to NBC.

“Colorado just seemed to be looking for opportunities to punish me for my faith,” Phillips said. Read the rest: Colorado cakemaker Jack Phillips persecuted by the Left.

Facts girl as WH press secretary: Kayleigh McEnany sweetly savage

Kayleigh McEnany, who looks like she should be hanging on the arm of a PGA golfer sipping a Mimosa, is President Trump’s cudgel for the press.

Behind her beauty lies a fine mind, which the born-again Christian puts to use handling the hostile anti-Trump press. She’s been described as a bulldog with a smile.

As White House press secretary, she regularly chastises a press corps that was cozy with Obama but aggressively antagonistic toward President Trump.

Once a reporter asked if she would take back a statement from her time working at Fox News, that President Trump would prevent Covid-19 from arriving on America’s shores. It was designed to humiliate her, since there was no real answer, but the quick-witted McEnany unloaded with both barrels.

“Does Vox want to take back that they proclaim that the coronavirus would not be a deadly pandemic? Does the Washington Post want to take back that they told Americans to get a grip the flu is bigger than the coronavirus? Does the Washington Post likewise want to take back that our brains are causing us to exaggerate the threat of the coronavirus?”

She rattled off a complete list of media hypocrisy.

“Does the New York Times want to take back that fear of the virus may be spreading faster than the virus itself? Does NPR want to take back that the flu was a much bigger threat than the coronavirus? And finally, once again, the Washington Post? Would they like to take back that the government should not respond aggressively to the coronavirus? I’ll leave you with those questions and maybe you’ll have some answers in a few days.”

Ouch! What a zinger!

The elites who constantly tell Americans what to think were stung. She was the perfect press secretary for Trump, a president who lives up to his self-description as a counter-puncher.

She didn’t get mad. She sweetly smiled. The media giants were aghast with her barbs.

If they were looking forward to chewing up Trump’s fourth press secretary, they found out fast it was going to be Goliath against David.

McEnany thinks God gave her the position.

“I believe God put me in this place for a purpose and for a reason like he does with each and every life,” McEnany told CBN News. “We’re all here for a reason.”

Raised in Tampa Bay, Florida, McEnany found Jesus when she was young. Two days after her 11th birthday, she watched with horror as Rachel Joy Scott was gunned down at Columbine High School because of her faith in Jesus. Asked by the perpetrators of the 1999 massacre if Rachel believed in God, she responded yes and was shot.

“Thank you, Rachel, for making the faith my parents taught me real in my own life,” McEnany tweeted years later. “It has always been my hope that you would greet me one day at Heaven’s pearly gates.”

Her father was a prosperous roofer, and she was a precocious student. She graduated with an international politics degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. before studying at Oxford.

After a 3-year stint producing the Mike Huckabee Show, McEnany started at Miami Law School. She was in the top 1% of the class, so she decided to transfer to Harvard Law School, where she graduated in 2016.

She prepares her presentations like a consummate researcher. After she worked briefly as a commentator for CNN, Van Jones noted, “There’s very few people in either party who can accomplish what Kayleigh has accomplished in such a short time. People keep taking her lightly, and they keep regretting it.”

Almost 32, McEnany was appointed Trump’s press secretary.

The national press is supposed to ask tough questions of politicians and try to filter through any lies or corruption. But since most reporters are progressive, they extend grace to liberal presidents and sharpen their knives whenever there’s a conservative president.

With Trump, the adversarial relationship has reached levels not seen since Richard Nixon was president. In 2018, the Media Research Center found that 92% of news reports about Trump were negative.

Welcome to the hurricane.

To be press secretary is to be a defender of the president. McEnany caught everyone off guard. “McEnany’s mission: Stand by, defend, punch back for Trump,” the Detroit News’ headlined. Read the rest: Kayleigh McEnany Christian.