Saturday, February 28, 2015

Purposeful bullying of bakeries belies gay community's creed of tolerance

In case you may have missed it, ladies and gents, further proof that liberals are hell-bent on tossing the First Amendment into the refuse bin, along with the Second, came earlier this month.
A few weeks ago, Oregon administrative law judge Alan McCullough said in an interim order that the owners of the suburban Portland-located Sweet Cakes by Melissa bakery, Aaron and Melissa Klein, discriminated against a lesbian couple by refusing to make a wedding cake for them. There will be a hearing on March 10, but the judge could have dismissed the case and awarded the Kleins compensation for court costs and attorney fees.
However, because Mr. and Mrs. Klein are Christian, there was no way that was going to happen.
When the gay couple Rachel Cryer and Laurel Bowman entered the bakery over two years ago, in January 2013, seeking a wedding cake for their nupitals, they were not surprised that Sweet Cakes essentially said, "sorry, but no." There are tons of liberal-minded bakeries—it's Portland, for Pete's sake—that they could have gone to for their cake.
In other words, Cryer and Bowman engaged in a sting operation. They simply wanted to bully a Christian couple out of their livelihood and they likely will succed since there seems to be a belief in the U.S.A. these days that discrimination based on sexual preference trumps an American citizen's Constitutionally enshrined right to freedom of religion.
While the lawyer for the lesbians cited the right of all people to be treated equally in a privately owned business, persuant to Oregon state law, the Kleins's attorney Anna Harmon called the judge's ruling a "wrong and dangerous result for religious liberty and rights of conscience in Oregon," and added that "Americans should not have to choose between adhering to their faith or closing their business, but that is what this decision means."
I couldn't agree more.
Aaron Klein told Fox News's Todd Starnes, who has been following the Kleins's case, that not only did he receive threats, but so did any suppliers or vendors to the bakery or any place that used Sweet Cakes for catering services:
"The LGBT activists inundated them with phone calls and threatened them [the suppliers]. They would tell our vendors, 'If you don't stop doing business with Sweet Cakes By Melissa, we will shut you down.' It's a sad day for Christian business owners and it's a sad day for the First Amendment. The LGBT attacks are the reason we are shutting down the shop. They have killed our business through mob tactics."
The great majority of Christians, 99.9 percent of them, would not say that stoning is an acceptable punishment to mete out on homosexuals. Another religion is notorious for advocating or actually carrying out such draconian responses to gays in their midst. Yet, are we going to witness the deliberate goading of a halal establishment by the LGBT community anytime soon?
The case against the Kleins and Sweet Cakes is, alas, not an isolated incident. In 2014, in the U.K., in the first ever case in this country in which an organization has been told that it must participate in a gay rights campaign, Ashers Bakers of Belfast came under fire from the Equality Commission for not producing a cake emblazoned with the slogan of a local gay campaign group, Queerspace. The bakery has now predictably had to face court action against it, which will begin next month.
The incoming Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, the Rev. Ian McNie, said, "They should have the right to determine what they do as a bakery and they should be tolerated", while the Christian Institute's Northern Ireland Officer Callum Webster said that "This is not what the equality laws are meant to do. We cannot sleepwalk into becoming a nation where coërced speech is acceptable."
Ashers Bakers employs 62 people. I would reason that in an age of insecurity over jobs, it would not be wise to put people out of work for frivolous reasons should the business collapse upon a possible losing judgment. But that's just me.
To give credit where credit is due, veteran gay campaigner Jeffrey Dudgeon, who worked to help decriminalize homosexuality in Northern Ireland, said the Equality Commission case against Ashers has gone too far. "I am nervous of gay zealotry, or any type of zealotry against Christians," Dudgeon said. "I am concerned that the Equality Commission have now added political discrimination to the discrimination on sexual orientation as a ground on running their case against Ashers."
Dudgeon's voice, however, is one that is lost in the wilderness. I hope the gay community at large is proud of these actions, whether it be here or across the pond. They crow all the time about the need for anti-bullying measures for gay people, but they have amongst them the most vicious, close-minded thugs when it comes to respecting other's peoples beliefs and lifestyles.
Don't hold your breath waiting for any denouncements of this behavior from the larger community that shelters these nogoodniks. As is always the case in groups where militancy is rife, it's "see no evil, hear no evil."

1 comment:

goddessdivine said...

Same thing is happening with florists and photographers. Unbelievable. Next up? Forcing religious institutions to perform same-sex marriages.

I'm tired of the left's hypocrisy.