Bigotry is bigotry and discrimination is illegal:
Yet another Oregon bakery has refused to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding, violating the state’s anti-discrimination consumer protection laws yet again.
Erin Hanson and Katie Pugh asked Pam Regentin of Fleur Cakes to provide the cake for their Mount Hood wedding, but were turned away after Regentin realized they were gay, as Pugh told KATU News: “I mentioned Erin in passing, and said a ‘she’ in passing too, in the email. A few days later she called back … and verified it was a same-sex wedding.”
Shortly after, Regentin told the couple she would not bake the cake.
In the middle of the last century, I’m sure lots of people explained that black people didn’t need coffee at the lunch counter—there were other lunch counters they could go to—and why would they want to sit at the front of the bus anyway? Those people lost the fight over civil rights.
Now the civil rights fight is about refusing service for gay weddings. This incident at Fleur Cakes is the second case like this in Oregon, and Washington State has a similar case involving Arlene’s Flowers & Gifts refusing to sell flowers for a gay couple’s wedding. Christian activists are trying to divide moderates and liberals by braying about their individual expression, claiming that religious liberty grants them a right to refuse service. They are arguing, essentially, that they deserve special rights to ignore anti-discrimination laws.
But as I said recently when supporting lawsuits against the florist in Eastern Washington, this isn’t about products: “It’s actually about the Christian right seeing how far they can push this envelope. The line between trivial product and necessary service is an impossibly broad gray area. But if you believe same-sex marriage is a right, then consider the products and services that society defines as essential to that wedding. It’s not a seat on the bus or a seat at the lunch counter—but it’s just as important. It is a reception hall, a dress, a tux, a bouquet. And if you believe gay people can be denied those things by anyone hiding behind a Bible, then gay weddings are second-class weddings.”
These clashes will keep happening until business proprietors are convicted or anti-discrimination laws are struck down.
If anti-discrimination laws mean anything, I believe they apply in these cases. And if the court strikes them down—if it finds that bakers and florists and banquet facilities can refuse service to a gay wedding—then they better strike down all the anti-discrimination laws that go with them. That would mean a hotel could refuse a room to an elderly woman because she’s Christian, a restaurant could refuse dinner to a man because he’s Asian, and a bank could refuse an account to a customer just because she’s a woman. The Christian right is calling for nothing less.