If I didn't know you were coming, I would have baked a cake.
Once upon a time there was a baker in a far off land called Oregon, who made beautiful cakes for all occasions. He and his family moved there because the charming little hamlet they settled in had no other bakeries, and the citizens were starving for cake.
One day two old spinsters came to the shop asking the baker to bake them a wedding cake, as neither of them had been married before and the big one, Marge, said to her friend: "Well let's just pretend then and tie the knot Berty!"
Arriving at the Bake Shop one day, the two old women explained to the baker they wanted a pretty wedding cake with two men on top. You see, Marge and Berty could only fit into big and, ah, short sized menswear, or at least that's what they told the curious ones.
Now the baker and his family were good people who didn't approve of pretend marriages... more specifically, baker didn't believe in gay marriage, which kind of explains why he was against baking a cake for their nuptials. Marge and Bertie were very sad and cried, but they were soon angered as well...
So what did they do? They decided to throw a lawsuit instead of a wedding.
As the old proverb says: As the baker, so the cake; No baker, no cake... ah, er, or, You can't have your muffin and eat it too...
The End
So what's it all about Cookie?
It seems these situations have been been happening a lot. I'm told elsewhere a florist was sued for refusing to do the flowers for a gay wedding. A week or so ago I wrote about another florist who refused to send flowers to an atheist.
To be honest, these situations confuse me. If I were running a business and baked cakes or arranged flowers, I'm not sure I would care if I were making or selling these products to good or bad people. Gays or straights. Believers or non believers. Now if there were abortafacients in the frosting, or cyanide gas in the floral spray, I wouldn't do it - in other words, I can see why a pharmacist would not want to sell contraceptives or the morning after pill. I can even see how a Justice of the Peace might have trouble performing a same sex marriage. But baking a cake? If it were my business, it seems I would regard it as a rather neutral act. To each his own.
Other bloggers see the incident(s) quite differently however. From what I understand others believe the women ordering the cake did so just to make an issue of the situation. They knew the baker was a Christian and would refuse to bake the cake. But how did they know that for sure? Just exactly how the other homosexuals knew a Christian florist would figure out that making two bridal bouquets would have to be for a same sex marriage. What?
When is this going to make sense. Bullwinkle?
In conscience they can not do it - because they don't believe in same sex marriage. Though uninvited to the wedding, and therefor not even a witness to it - marriages to be legal must be witnessed I think - their consciences would be violated because they made the cake and arranged the flowers. I get that... kinda. But how did the women know the baker would refuse the couple goods and services? I don't know - other people are claiming they did and that they were really just trying to make a federal case out of it... If true...
Why?
I'm glad you asked that, because I think I figured it all out after reading Fr. Longenecker's post on the approval of same sex marriage in the UK. In his com box, someone mentioned civil rights... Now we know same sex marriage is not a real civil right... but it is fast being promoted as such. To make a long post short here, I have laid out the reason for these frivolous law suits against business owners who are conscientious objectors to same sex marriage... Here it is (I left it as a comment on Fr. L's post):
The baby steps of suing bakers and florists and hoteliers for not accommodating same sex weddings is the necessary groundwork needed to make the case for the civil rights claims. Excluding a particular group from goods and services is what happened to blacks in this country, and Jews in Nazi Germany. Lawsuits claiming discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation form the necessary precedent to establish the claim of civil rights violations. Soon, if not already, same sex marriage is popularly regarded as a genuine civil right.
Like I said,
He totally makes this crap up!
I'm against it. Same sex marriage, that is. Although I'd be happy to sell you one of my paintings - no questions asked.
What?
I'm fixing to be real unpopular in 3.2.1...
ReplyDeleteThis whole civil right issue as pertaining to privately held companies is wrong.
If I own a business I should be able to serve, or not serve, anyone. That includes race, religion, or whatever. No one has a "right" to the services of other individuals. That's called slavery.
Public accommodations are another story.
In Nazi Germany, the state was the driver behind first attacking Jewish owned businesses and later the refusal to serve Jews. That sort of discrimination is top down, not bottom up.
As to the lesbians involved? I don't think they set out to entrap the baker. But, having been told politely that he didn't want to make them a cake, they should have picked up their marbles and carried on somewhere else since I'm sure there was a plethora of bakeries willing to make them a cake.
By the time they are done with the baker, his business and life will be decimated. How can that be even remotely considered an okay thing to do?
When I did hair, many of my customers were homosexuals or lesbians. I really didn't care. Hair is hair. And if I were to make wedding cakes, I probably wouldn't care who ate them, either. But, I will defend this bakers right to not make a cake if he doesn't want to.
Thanks Adrienne - I so appreciate your point of view. I agree with you really. I think however these little episodes are calculated to establish precedent - no matter if that was the original intent of proposing the contract in the first place. I can almost hear some ACLU motivated attorney yelling "Jackpot!" when he hears about cases such as these.
ReplyDeletePrecedent? Exactly!! You are spot on. Roe v Wade was bad law. Just about every legal scholar has said so. Yet - it is used as "precedent." So further laws are made using bad law as precedent. In what world does that make sense?
ReplyDeleteI never did like Seinfeld; I liked Kramer, George and Elaine so didn't bother watching the show.
ReplyDelete+JMJ+
ReplyDeleteLast June, a person and a book with seemingly no connection to each other entered my life. The person was a colleague at the company where I had just been hired, who turned out to be an excellent mentor. The book was Ermita by F. Sionil Jose, which is about a convent girl who becomes the most successful prostitute in the country after she hears a definition of prostitution that doesn't offend her conscience. Imagine my surprise when I heard that definition again--paraphrased, of course--from the mouth of my mentor.
I had just asked him how he was managing to flourish, despite a new policy change that everyone else was complaining about. He said: "It's very simple. I remind myself that it's all about the MONEY. As long as the boss pays me well, I will do anything he asks me to do."
That was when I realised what a fine line there is between professionalism and prostitution--both of which make good business sense.
In a nutshell, my thesis is that stories like this are controversial only because we're surprised to find that our economy full of prostitutes still has a few people who want to call themselves professionals while picking and choosing their clients. That's not business. That's more like dating. So it's not surprising that the two women in this story are acting not like disgruntled clients, but like the traditional "women scorned." Hell hath no fury like someone whose honestly earned money wasn't good enough.
A woman scorned - works for me.
ReplyDeleteIf I understand your point, Terry, you're saying that by denying such things as cakes and flowers, which are morally neutral, to homosexuals to use in their fake weddings, we are actually helping them because we are giving them a basis to cry "Discrimination." That, in turn, leads to these stupid lawsuits which actually gives them even more rights than they had before.
ReplyDeleteI had never thought of these things in that light before, and I think you're making an excellent point.
But I think we have gotten to a point in our culture where it has become so morally depraved that there is nothing left for it but to be destroyed. Our goal can no longer be to try to save society, but to pull as many people as possible to safety.
So even though denying such morally neutral things as cakes and flowers may lead to lawsuits which lead to more rights being granted to homosexuals, I think it's still important to do it because now it's all about making a statement and letting the world know that this is immoral behavior. This is something we should and need to do every chance we get, even though, and maybe because, it will lead to ever greater persecution.
Persecution, while no fun, can be a powerful spiritual tool because it forces us to stand for what we believe in and makes us stronger.
C in B - Thanks for the good comment. It helps me understand why a baker thinks it is necessary to refuse baking the cake - it being his only chance outside of the voting booth to publicly demonstrate against the legalization of ss marriage.
ReplyDeleteI didn't mean to suggest that when Christians do this they are enabling the other to do a lawsuit - What I was trying to say is that the ss couple's litigation becomes their means to establish a sort of legal precedent of discrimination - thus reinforcing the claim that ss marriage is actually a civil right. As that notion gets repeated enough - popular opinion accepts it.
Thank you for sharing this interesting issue in terms of sexual abuse! I heard this issue before but it's not yet proven right? So we shouldn't jump into a conclusion!
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