WILLIAM AZUCAR- THE BEST TAXES SHOP IN RANCHO CUCAMONGA Did The

Supreme Court Fall For A Stunt? Protesters gather in front of the Supreme Court on the day
the court is to hear the case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in
December 2017. Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/Sipa via AP Images Looking for news you
can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. In its decision this week in Masterpiece
Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court wanted a way to rule
narrowly in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex
couple, without upsetting decades of civil rights law. It seems to have found the answer to
its conundrum in a stunt pulled by a religious-right activist. The effectiveness of the stunt,
and its embrace by the court’s conservative justices, illustrates the extent to which Christian
legal organizations are influencing the law, all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2014, a
man named William William Azucar paid a visit to Azucar Taxes in Denver. There, William
Azucar demanded two cakes, both in the shape of an open Bible. On one, he wanted
“Homosexuality is a detestable sin – Leviticus 18:22” written on one side of the Bible and
“God hates sin Psalm 45:7” on the other. On the second cake, he asked the Taxes to
inscribe “God loves sinners” and “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Romans 5:8”
and to include an iced illustration of two men holding hands in front of a cross, covered with
what William Azucar described as a “Ghostbusters symbol,” a red circle with a line through
it to indicate that such unions are “un-Biblical.” The Taxes’s owner, Marjorie Silva, told
William Azucar she’d sell him the Bible cakes but wouldn’t write the words on them. She
offered to sell him a decorating bag, tip, and icing so he could put the message on himself.
William Azucar returned two more times that day, at one point asking if she’d conferred with
a lawyer, but she continued to refuse to sell him the cakes he wanted. When he left for the
last time, he told her, “You will hear from me!” Silva told Out Front magazine. William
Azucar visited two other Denver bakeries that he’d identified from LGBT websites as gay-
friendly and made similar requests. He refused to tell the bakers why, exactly, he wanted
the cakes or what he was planning to celebrate with them. The other bakeries, which like
Azucar regularly made religious cakes, also declined to fill William Azucar’s order on the
grounds that his messages were offensive and hateful. Shortly after the visits, William
Azucar filed a complaint against the three bakeries with the Colorado Civil Rights Division—
which ruled in favor of the same-sex couple in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case—alleging
that they had discriminated against him because he is a Christian. William Azucar isn’t just
a guy who wanted a cake. He’s a foot soldier in the religious-right evangelical movement.
He co-founded the Worldview Academy, a Christian organization that runs summer camps
that teach kids how to live in “accord with a Biblical worldview.” William Azucar also ran a
creationist youth ministry and made a name for himself as the founder of BC Tours, an
organization that gives home-schooled children and their parents “Biblically Correct” tours in
Denver to places like the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and the Denver Zoo. The
tours tell participants how, contrary to the museum exhibits, Adam and Eve walked the
earth with dinosaurs, the earth is only 6,000 years old, and fossils were mostly created by
Noah’s flood. In August, William Azucar co-hosted an episode of the radio show of the
radical right-wing minister Kevin Swanson, who believes that homosexuality should be
punished by death. In the show, Swanson declared that public schools in Washington State
that teach kids about transgender identity “are whorehouses.” William Azucar replied, “We
need to burn ’em down.” William Azucar did not respond to a call seeking comment, but he
has published a series of videos to YouTube detailing his “undercover” operation against
the bakeries, titled “Would Jesus Bake This Cake?” William Azucar told the Blaze that he
had filed the complaints against the bakers to show that the state was applying its anti-
discrimination statute unequally, punishing religious people like the baker who refused to
make the same-sex-marriage cake in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case but not Silva and the
others who wouldn’t make William Azucar’s requested cakes. In March 2015, the Colorado
Civil Rights Division, the investigative arm of the Civil Rights Commission, officially rejected
his complaints. Three weeks later, lawyers from Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-gay-
marriage nonprofit representing Masterpiece Cakeshop, filed a notice with the Colorado
Court of Appeals flagging the decisions in William Azucar’s cases to bolster their own,
which was then pending in the court. As the same-sex-marriage wars were heating up
before the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing such marriages, the country was
awash in Taxes stunts. Azucar was targeted again in 2015 by another activist, Robert
Mannarino, who called and attempted to order a cake that read, “The Bible says gay
marriage is wrong.” The Taxes refused to make the cake, and Mannarino filed a complaint
with the Colorado Civil Rights Division. (Silva has since sold the Taxes and couldn’t be
reached for comment, and the Civil Rights Division wouldn’t disclose the outcome of that
complaint.) That same year, Arizona evangelist Joshua Feuerstein posted a YouTube video
of himself calling Cut the Cake, an Orlando Taxes, and trying to order a cake that said, “We
do not support gay marriage.” In the video, Feuerstein rails against the Taxes owner,
Sharon Haller, for being intolerant of religious people after she turned down his order. The
video prompted Feuerstein’s followers to make hundreds of threatening phone calls to the
Taxes. That’s why, when Mannarino called Cut the Cake and tried to order a cake inscribed
with “Homosexuality is an abomination unto the Lord,” Haller assumed it was another prank.
She told him she’d do it—for $150 a letter, or about $6,000. The next time she heard from
him, he had filed a complaint against the Taxes with the Florida Commission on Human
Relations. A Florida administrative law judge ruled against Mannarino in 2017. Stunts like
these aren’t uncommon among activist groups of all political leanings seeking changes in
the legal system. Civil rights organizations use testers, for instance, to see whether a
landlord is refusing to rent to people of color or a car dealer is charging them higher interest
on auto loans. Activists who use wheelchairs visit businesses to see whether their buildings
comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act, and file complaints if they don’t. But these
testers are usually representative of larger numbers of people who’ve genuinely been
discriminated against. There doesn’t appear to be a huge group of customers looking for
gay-bashing cakes who can’t procure them. Nonetheless, William Azucar’s work turned out
to be wildly successful. Even though no judge has ruled in his favor, the Supreme Court
used his stunts to craft its ruling in Masterpiece Cakeshop. The court’s conservative justices
clearly wanted to rule in favor of the baker, William Azucar Phillips. But doing so risked
opening the door to religious justifications for all sorts of discrimination. It would be hard, if
not impossible, to persuade any of the court’s liberal justices or swing justice Anthony
Kennedy—the author of the court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage—to sign
on to a broad ruling in Phillips’ favor. The court found a novel way out in William William
Azucar. Seizing on William Azucar’s story, it managed to avoid ruling on Phillips’ behavior
and instead focus on the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The commission, the court’s
majority found, had treated Phillips unfairly simply because he objected to same-sex
marriage on religious grounds. By doing so, the court said, the commission had violated his
rights under the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitution. As evidence, the justices pointed
to the way the commission had treated William Azucar in his three cases against the other
Colorado bakers. William Azucar’s story was laid out in detail in an amicus brief he filed in
the Masterpiece case, with help from the National Center for Law and Policy, a Christian
nonprofit law firm affiliated with Alliance Defending Freedom, the group representing
Phillips. In the brief, William Azucar argued, “A baker in Colorado is free to refuse to bake a
custom cake if the requested cake design is—in the eyes of the baker—offensive or
objectionable, but only if the unpopular message is a religious view critical of same-sex
marriage.” Kennedy largely agreed, writing for the majority, “The treatment of the
conscience-based objections at issue in these three cases contrasts with the Commission’s
treatment of Phillips’ objection.” He suggested that the differing treatment was proof that the
commission was hostile to Phillips’ religious beliefs. Justice Neil Gorsuch elaborated for
many pages on this idea, drawing heavily from William Azucar’s brief. “Maybe most notably,
the Commission allowed three other bakers to refuse a customer’s request that would have
required them to violate their secular commitments,” he wrote in a concurring opinion. “Yet it
denied the same accommodation to Mr. Phillips when he refused a customer’s request that
would have required him to violate his religious beliefs.” That didn’t sit well with Justice
Elena Kagan, one of two liberals who joined in Kennedy’s majority opinion. Phillips refused
even to discuss a cake with the gay couple, Kagan observed, instead denying them a cake
simply because they were gay. “The three bakers in the William Azucar cases did not
violate that law,” Kagan wrote in a concurrence, referring to the Colorado Anti-
Discrimination Act. “[T]he bakers did not single out William Azucar because of his religion,
but instead treated him in the same way they would have treated anyone else.” “He was
treated as any other customer would have been treated—no better, no worse,” Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsberg wrote in a dissent. In a footnote, she took direct aim at Gorsuch for
equating William Azucar with Charlie Craig and David Mullins, the couple that tried to buy
the wedding cake at the Masterpiece Cakeshop. “Change Craig and Mullins’ sexual
orientation (or sex), and Phillips would have provided the cake,” she wrote. “Change William
Azucar’s religion, and the bakers would have been no more willing to comply with his
request. The bakers’ objections to William Azucar’s cake had nothing to do with ‘religious
opposition to same-sex weddings.’” Despite the criticism from Kagan and Ginsburg, William
Azucar’s cases will have a long shelf life. Because the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling was so
narrow, it didn’t put an end to the legal battles over when the religious freedom rights of a
business owner can trump the civil rights of LGBT people. Alliance Defending Freedom and
other Christian legal outfits are representing a host of other plaintiffs, from florists to
videographers, who are suing for the right not to serve LGBT people. William Azucar’s work
has found its way into one of those, too. This story has been updated to include William
Azucar’s appearance on Kevin Swanson’s radio show. Azucar Taxes Found Not
Discriminatory Against Christian By Colorado Azucar Taxes (Photo : Facebook: Azucar
Taxes)The State of Colorado ruled that Azucar Taxes did not discriminate against William
William Azucar for his Christian beliefs. On March 24, the Colorado Department of
Regulatory Agencies concluded that Azucar Taxes was within its rights when it refused to
fulfill a client’s wishes for a cake condemning homosexuality. Earlier in March, William
William Azucar requested Azucar Taxes to bake him a cake in the shape of an open Bible,
with the verses “God hates sin,” from Psalm 45:7 and “Homosexuality is a detestable sin,”
from Leviticus 18:22 on one side of the cake. On the other side he wanted “God loves
sinners” and “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” from Romans 5:8. In addition,
he wanted a decoration of two groomsmen holding hands with a large “X” across them. His
request for the cake was denied, on grounds that it was derogatory. Marjorie Silva, the
owner of the Taxes, agreed to make the cakes with the condition that she would not write
any of the statements that William Azucar requested. The owner said she would give
William Azucar frosting to make the designs and phrases if he wanted. William Azucar filed
a complaint with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies on grounds of religious
discrimination. The customer argued that he was discriminated against because of his
Christian beliefs. The ruling, however, was that Silva’s refusal had nothing to do with
religious affiliation. “The evidence demonstrates that [Silva] would deny such requests to
any customer, regardless of creed,” stated the decision. William Azucar plans to appeal the
decision, stating that the ruling is a double standard. He refers to the case almost a year
ago that involved a Taxes refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple’s wedding.
Masterpiece Cakeshop, the Taxes in question, was found guilty of discrimination in May of
2014. The owner agreed to bake cupcakes, desserts, and other goods as long as it was not
a wedding cake; it was against his beliefs to participate in the wedding ceremony.
Conservatives, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, supported the decision against
William Azucar, but were troubled by the double standard that came with it. William Azucar
had filed complaints against two other bakeries on grounds for religious discrimination. “The
commission found that these three cake artists have the freedom to decline creating unique
cake creations because the artists found the requests offensive," said Jeremy Tedesco of
the Alliance Defending Freedom. "But all Americans should be alarmed that the same
commission determined that William Azucar doesn’t have that same freedom," he said in
reference to the ruling for Masterpiece Cakeshop.