What would Jesus bake?
May 17, 2013, 5:33 AM | Updated: 10:37 am
(Image courtesy fleurcakes.com, by BlaineandBethany.com)
It’s happened again – another bakery is refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Erin Hanson and Katie Pugh were planning a wedding in Hood River Oregon, and told KATU they found the perfect local bakery.
“I found a gal that was baking gorgeous cakes and I contacted her and we set up a time to do a tasting.”
But in the course of her e-mail correspondence with the bakery, Katie referred to her fiancee as a “she.”
“And a few days later she called back,” Katie says. “Called and verified it was a same sex wedding.”
KATU called Pam Regentin, who runs the bakery out of her home, “I believe that I have the liberty to live by my principles.”
That’s against the law in Oregon, but notice – she used the word “liberty.” And that seems to be where this issue is going.
“In a free society, people should have the ability to do things that are mean or even bad for their business. The market is big enough to handle this,” says Joseph Backholm, who runs the Family Policy Institute just across the border in Washington state.
Backholm says just because a business is open to the public doesn’t mean it has to do EVERYTHING its customers ask.
“Would you want to compel a black person to bake a cake for a Klan rally? And we’d all say, ‘Of course not.’ Does that mean they’re discriminating on the basis of race? No. They’ll serve white people but not white people who happen to be members of the Klan and celebrating,” says Backholm.
It’s kind of like Abercrombie and Fitch saying ‘Hey, we don’t want to sell clothes to fat people.’
But in this case, what the bakery did is against Oregon law and it’s all headed to court.