Liberal Outrage of the Week: Wedding Cakes

As many Americans enjoyed their week off following Christmas 2017, an appeals court upheld the $135,000 fine that Aaron and Melissa Klein must pay for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding.  The Kleins, who owned Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Gresham, Oregon; cited their religious beliefs that view marriage as a union between one man and one woman as their reason for their refusal to bake the cake. 

 

 

Jack Phillips, a baker in Colorado who also refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding for religious reasons, has taken his case all the way to the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court will likely issue their decision in June.  Phillips’ business, Masterpiece Cakeshop, has survived the firestorm, unlike Sweet Cakes by Melissa, which had to shut down.  The outcome of the case will likely signal the success or failure of the Kleins’ legal case.   As Julie Borowski pointed out, “What’s annoying about this case is that it was in Lakewood, Colorado; right outside of Denver.  I’ve been to Denver, it’s a progressive place.  If this one baker, one person, wouldn’t bake this cake, they could have found at least a dozen other bakeries in the area who would have loved to bake the cake for their wedding.” Lately, the Church of Liberalism seems to have the same end goal as radical Islam: submission.        

 

The libertarian view argues that the government has no business regulating the behavior of businesses and believes that the free market should decide the fate of businesses who refuse to provide cakes for gay weddings, not the government.   Others say that the Freedom of Association and Freedom of Religion clauses of the First Amendment protect the actions of the Kleins and Phillips.  The left argues that refusing to bake cakes for same-sex weddings violates the civil rights of LGBT people, whom the left wants the law to recognize as a protected class.  Pastor Robert Jeffress weighed in on the left’s use of anti-discrimination and Civil Rights laws to punish people of faith, saying “Those are unintended consequences from the Court but intended consequences from the left.”  Anyone looking for totalitarianism might want to look on the left, not the right.      

 

In recent years, the left has gone on a jihad against people who believe in traditional marriage.  In 2009, Miss California Carrie Prejean faced enormous backlash from the PC police when she proclaimed her support for the traditional definition of marriage, saying “We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And, you know what, in my country, in my family, I think that, I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there.”  Openly gay TV personality Perez Hilton, a judge in that year’s Miss USA pageant, had asked for her view on marriage as she stood on stage vying for the coveted title of Miss USA.  When he deemed her answer unsatisfactory, he referred to her as a “dumb b****”, totally out of character for the “tolerant left” (just kidding).  Prejean later argued that her politically incorrect answer may have cost her the crown but she didn’t seem to care, telling Fox News that “This happened for a reason.  By having to answer that question in front of a national audience, God was testing my character and faith.  I’m glad I stayed true to myself.”  We should all agree that Prejean passed the test with flying colors.      

 

Brendan Eich resigned from his job as CEO of Mozilla after liberal activists expressed outrage that he committed the unthinkable crime of donating $1,000 in support of Proposition 8; the 2008 California ballot initiative that established a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman.  As Ann Coulter pointed out in her book In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome, “By 2012, Obama’s 2008 position on gay marriage, as ‘the union between a man and a woman’ had become the vicious Klan position, a transformation unparalleled in the physical universe.”  For the record, Obama’s campaign manager David Axelrod later admitted that Obama only pretended to oppose gay marriage in 2008; as it had not yet become popular among the American public.   

 

For all the talk about how closed-minded and intolerant conservative Christians are, that phrase might more accurately apply to liberals.  Liberal big city mayors including Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel and New York City’s Comrade Bill de Blasio indicated that they did not want fast food chain Chick-Fil-A to open a branch in their respective cities because they did not like CEO Dan Cathy’s support for the “biblical view of the family unit.”  Yet many of these same mayors have no problem letting a flood of illegal immigrants into their cities.  I guess I’ll never quite understand liberal logic.  Having eaten at a Chick-Fil-A for the first time last week, I can tell you that any city should want a Chick-Fil-A to open up in their town.  The girl behind the counter actually brought the food to our table, while most Fast Food restaurants have customers wait in line while their food is prepared.  The manager came over and asked us “How are y’all doing?” and offered my parents and I refills and gave us mints.  The Chick-Fil-A staff went above and beyond to ensure that my family and I had an enjoyable experience and I noticed that they treated every other family in the restaurant exactly the same.       

 

In my opinion, no bakery can compete with the Triple Chocolate Fudge cake with peanut butter frosting that my mother makes.  Couples all across the country could save a lot of money by going with a homemade wedding cake.  Millennials, who boast an average student loan debt of $37,173 and an unemployment rate of 14.7 percent, might want to consider taking my suggestion.  As Steve Martin’s character in “Father of the Bride” pointed out, “A cake is made of flour and water.”  Fifty years after a wedding, who will even remember anything about the wedding cake?  As Katie Pavlich pointed out on “The Five” last week, “It’s not about the wedding, it’s not about the proposal, it’s about the marriage.”          

 

A few states have tried to push back on the assault against those with traditional values from the radical left by passing religious freedom laws; including Indiana, where Future Vice President Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law.   In response to the passage of the law, governors from liberal states advised their residents not to travel to The Hoosier State.   As the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act caused liberals’ heads to explode, Former Republican Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum introduced a hypothetical scenario where a business owned by a group sympathetic to liberals faced a similar dilemma. “If you’re a print shop and you are a gay man, should you be forced to print ‘God hates fags’ for the Westboro Baptist church because they hold those signs up?”  Former Fox News Contributor Mary Katharine Ham pointed out that “These laws don’t just protect the folks you don’t like, on the left, the left liked religious liberty protections fine until they decided somebody who they don’t like…might use them.”  Then-governor Pence later signed an amended version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law that provided protections for LGBT people.      

 

Legally speaking, a very strong argument exists that the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in the Hobby Lobby case set a precedent that will allow business owners to refuse to provide services that violate their religious beliefs.  The Christian-owned business argued that the contraception mandate of Obamacare, which required employer-sponsored health insurance plans to cover contraceptives, violated their religious beliefs; as some of the contraceptives amounted to abortifacients, drugs that deliberately cause abortions.  The Supreme Court agreed with Hobby Lobby by a 5-4 margin.  The Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of Catholic nuns, had also taken their beef with the contraception mandate to Court; however, they received some relief earlier this year when President Trump eased enforcement of the contraception mandate via an executive order on religious freedom that he signed on the National Day of Prayer.

 

The Court’s upcoming decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission will have an enormous impact on the Culture War.  Now that the left has declared victory on gay marriage, which resulted from the increasing secularization in our culture, the question remains as to whether they will now have the ability to use the force of government to punish the few and far between who still devoutly hold traditional beliefs.  We shall see.      

 

 

Stay tuned for the next installment of “Liberal Outrage of the Week.”