Sweet Cakes By Melissa, a Christian family-owned bakery was forced to go out of business a few days ago. The Oregan bakery chose to shut its doors following months of harassment by militant homosexual activists.
Last January, Aaron and Melissa Klein refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. The Kleins contend, because of their religious faith, the family could not take part in gay wedding events. Succinctly put, Aaron said, “I don’t want to help somebody celebrate a commitment to a lifetime of sin.”
Well, the lesbian couple filed a discrimination complaint with the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries and told their story to local newspapers and television stations. Within days, militant homosexual groups launched protests and boycotts.
The protestors then turned on other wedding vendors around the community. They threatened to boycott any florists, wedding planners or other vendors that did business with the Kleins.
“That tipped the scales,” Klein said to a reporter. “The Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual and Transgender (LGBT) activists inundated us with phone calls and threats to kill the family. They would tell our vendors, ‘If you don’t stop doing business with Sweet Cakes By Melissa, we will shut you down.’”
Sad to say, the Kleins are among the more recent to suffer this blatant display of intolerance. Just last month, New Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that two Christian photographers who declined to photograph a same-sex union violated the state’s Human Rights Act. One justice said the photographers were “compelled by law to compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives.”
Jack Phillips, a Denver baker, is facing possible jail time for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. The Colorado Attorney General’s office filed a formal complaint against Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cake Shop.
In Indianapolis, a family-owned cookie shop faced a discrimination investigation after they refused to make rainbow cookies for National Coming Out Day.
A T-shirt company in Lexington, Kentucky, found itself at the center of a Human Rights Commission investigation after they refused to make T-shirts for a local gay rights organization.
Whereas Christians are being targeted by intolerant gay bullies, other institutions are allowed to take principled and professional positions against the LGBT without reprisals. For instance, for more than thirty years there has been a federal ban on gays donating blood.
The plan was to stem the spread of HIV. Research confirms that gay men are disproportionately affected by AIDS and hepatitis B, both blood-borne diseases. While gays make up about 4% of the U.S. population, they account for some 50% of all patients living with HIV. The Centers for Disease Control estimate six out of ten new HIV patients are men who have had sex with men.
Despite these glaring statistics, there have been recent moves to lift the 30-year ban on gays donating blood. Interestingly, these recent moves to change federal policies have been civil and have been in process for about the last two years.
Why can’t similar civility be applied to Christians who are entitled to live in accordance with their faith and conscience? Let us revisit the Kleins in Oregon. How could they be accused of discrimination by the authorities when death threats from LGBT activists are being ignored by the same authorities?
Imagine, the Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries announced a few days ago that they had launched a formal discrimination investigation against the Kleins. Commissioner Brad Avakian told The Oregonian that he was committed to a thorough investigation to determine whether the bakery discriminated against the lesbian customers.
According to the Commissioner, “Everybody is entitled to their own beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that folks have the right to discriminate,” he told the newspaper. “The goal is to rehabilitate. For those who do violate the law, we want them to learn from that experience and have a good, successful business in Oregon.”
As Christians, we find ourselves in a culture that is hostile to our worldviews. As with slavery, we are expected to obey laws that are blatantly immoral. Although very difficult to swallow, we should not be surprised with such hostility. It is in times like these we need to remember that “the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds” (1 Corinthians 10:4).
2 comments:
This story is an indictment of the times in which we live. As we know, it's already foretold in the Bible of the persecution Christians will endure. It will get much, much worse before it gets better. But praise be to God...we know the outcome.
Here is one of the challenges of a militant secularism - no morality or value should be shoved down anyone's throat, except the one that says we celebrate the powerful's morality or else pay the penalty. What a conundrum!!
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