Did Whoopi Goldberg play a prophetic role prophesying what is happening in our society today?
In her role as Guinan in the sci-fi series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Goldberg played a wise sage who warns of the tyranny of the Borg.
For those unfamiliar with the series, the Borg was a collection of drones linked to a hive mind which became a mortal enemy of the starship Enterprise and Earth. Their goal? To dominate and assimilate everyone into their control and collective mindset. It is a vivid illustration of how the left in the West seeks to dominate cultures, politics and law. The sci-fi television program’s screen writers unwittingly gave a great analogy of how relentless the left is in their doctrine and practice of subduing people and galaxies.
Ironically, actress and radical progressive Whoopie Goldberg, in her role as Guinan, warns about this tyranny, which swallows up the identity, humanity and individual expression of people and forces them to become biological robots. The vanquished victims are told that, “Resistance is futile” as they are assimilated into the Borg collective. The left has mirrored this same attitude and brute force that can be seen in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop baker, Jack Phillips. The state of Colorado just will not give it up.
On June 4, 2018, the Supreme Court ruled against the state of Colorado and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission enforcing cake baker, Phillips, the right to expression. In review of the case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission violated Phillips’ right to due process when it fined him for refusing to bake a cake celebrating a gay wedding, which violated his religious beliefs. The record showed that one commissioner openly insulted Phillips’ Christian faith, calling it “despicable.” However, the Court held Phillips was entitled to an impartial and neutral decision-maker. The hostility of the Commissioner violated the First Amendment’s guarantee that the law be applied in a neutral manner toward religion.
In one of the under-reported aspects of the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy tried in part to, “put the genie back in the bottle” he uncorked in his earlier opinion legalizing gay marriage. Kennedy wrote, “At the same time, the religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected view and, in some instances, protected forms of expressions”. (My question to that statement is, “Why just some instances?”) In response to Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, three of the justices, Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas, wrote opinions that suggested making a cake amounted to a form of expression.
Based on these opinions, Phillips was entitled to protection from the act of force applied by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and its hostile commissioner to engage in expression that would violate his conscience. Justice Clarence Thomas, mindful of the “Borg type” attack of the left, cautioned that First Amendment protection is “essential” to keep the Obergefell gay marriage decision from being used to “stamp out every vestige of dissent and vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy”.
How prophetic Thomas was.
Roughly a month after their defeat in the Supreme Court, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission is after Phillips again asserting a new discrimination charge. This time, Phillips refused to bake a cake celebrating a person’s “transition” to the female gender.
Phillips’ religious beliefs stand for the previously well-settled position that God created people male and female. The Commission contends that Phillips denied the transgender woman “equal enjoyment of a place of public accommodation.”
Even a first-year law student can see the legal issues in requiring Jack Phillips to bake a gender transition cake which is nearly identical to the Masterpiece Cakeshop case that Phillips already won just a month earlier. Yet, the so-called Civil Rights Commission continues to target Phillips with its holy war. Their Borg-like stance projects the message that resistance is futile.
The constant legal controversy has put Phillips in financial distress. It is another irony that Phillips’ attorneys are having to apply the federal Civil rights Act of 1871 against the Civil Rights Commission. This is the same statute that was passed to stop the Ku Klux Klan and which they have called upon again to protect Phillips from the Commission’s bigotry and Soviet-style persecution. Perhaps the Commission should be dubbed the “Borg-Colorado Chapter.”
It is one thing to articulate a protected right; it is another thing to actually protect it. The case with the Colorado baker shows the critical need to have judges who are committed to an originalist view that enforces religious freedom and other freedoms that have been fixed in the constellation of American freedom since our founding. What is currently at stake is the courts become politicized with a majority of activist justices who are nothing more than result-oriented, robed autocrats. If that happens, we will have lost our liberty.
With the pending addition of a new Supreme Court justice, presumably Brett Kavanaugh, Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd v. Colorado II will have an opportunity to weigh in on whether cake baking and symbolic expressions can be compelled by the state in the name of “antidiscrimination.” Nevertheless, the lawless left is still demanding that all people who dissent from its orthodoxy report for assimilation into the collective or else.
Freedom-loving Americans must not silently acquiesce, for resistance is vital, not futile.
Brent Olsson holds a Juris Doctor degree and a Bachelor of Arts in history. He has practiced law for 30 years, specializing in litigation. He has litigated religious liberty issues and has assisted the Alliance Defending Freedom. He has also taught on America’s religious heritage. He is married to Jene, and they have three children. For additional articles on America’s history and freedoms go to: facebook.com/Brentolsson
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