In July of 2015, Aaron and Melissa Klein, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Gresham, Ore., were ordered by the state labor commissioner to pay $135,000 in emotional damages to a same-sex couple to whom they had denied service. The Kleins’ actions were guided by their religious beliefs, but the commissioner, Brad Avakian, was having none of it. In addition to the fine, he imposed a gag order on the Kleins that prevented them from sharing their story with the media. “According to the state of Oregon,” the Kleins wrote on their Facebook page, “we neither have freedom of religion or freedom of speech.”
Now fast-forward to this past Monday and to another cake refusal by another baker. This time, though, the story has a very different outcome. But let’s let the spurned customer, 18-year-0ld McKenzie Gill of Bossier City, La., tell it:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Our colleague Onan Coca has the background details at Constitution.com:
Apparently, Ms. Gill was ordering a birthday cake for her Trump themed 18th birthday party when she was notified by the baker that she would not be making such a cake for her. When Gill and her mother arrived at the Albertson’s bakery to order their cake, they never expected that they might be doing something controversial.“We just need an American flag cake with Trump 2016 on it, and right when I said Trump the lady just (makes face) kinda Trump? And she was like I can make you a flag cake but I’m not going to write Trump on it,” Ms. Gill told the local Fox News station. When they realized that the bakery would not make the cake they wanted, they simply went elsewhere to get it. “It’s your job, we’re not really going for your opinion on what you think of the candidates we were just wanting Trump 2016 on the cake.”
To repeat — and it certainly bears repeating — when Gill was refused service, she took her business elsewhere. Which is precisely what Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer, the vengeful lesbian couple who put the Kleins out of business, could (and should!) have done.
One other point worth noting here is the Left’s response to this story, which has been deafening silence. One lone voice, the hard-Left “investigative” website Snopes.com, claims that the whole affair was a simple mistake, that the refusal stemmed from “an employee’s misunderstanding about the use of copyrighted phrases and was not a politically-motivated issue.”
Yeah, and if you believe that, Hillary Clinton has a bridge she’d like to sell you.
