Well over a year ago I wrote a post about Aaron and Melissa Klein, the owners of Sweet Cakes By Melissa in Oregon, who decided to close their shop after continual harassment from homosexuals and their supporters. If you’re not familiar with their story, the Kleins declined to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple, citing their Christian beliefs that marriage should be between a man and a woman. In addition to the harassment the Kleins received, their vendors were also harassed into no longer doing business with the Kleins, resulting in a great loss of sales. Their attorney referred to it as “economic terrorism.” The Kleins closed their shop but said they would continue to take orders and operate from their home.
The lesbians who had their feelings hurt filed a discrimination complaint against the Kleins. Last week an administrative law judge with Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries ruled that the Kleins were in violation of the state’s anti-discrimination law. The fine could be as high as $150,000, with the amount to be set at a hearing on March 10. What’s interesting about it is that the Kleins refusal to provide a cake was in February 2013, but it was not until May 2014 that a court ruled Oregon’s ban on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional. How could the Kleins be discriminating against a lesbian wedding that the state of Oregon considered to not be legal in the first place?
It does not matter if the fine is $1 or the full amount of $150,000, what the state of Oregon is saying is that the mythical constitutional right for homosexuals to not be offended trumps the rights delineated in the First Amendment that give people the right to the free exercise of religion.
Aaron Klein got it exactly right when he told Fox News, “They’re trying to push us into the closet for being Christians.”
I have written in several posts before that the left will not be satisfied until homosexuality is completely mainstreamed, normalized and accepted by all and it is Christians who are in the closet. When people such as the Kleins have to choose between adhering to their faith or closing their business, the religious liberty that Americans have enjoyed for more than two centuries is in danger of being taken away. It should not be surprising, however, that the left attempts to do this. The left cares nothing for religious liberty and rejects morality as being a religious invention designed to control people. Consequently, when people such as the Kleins express their moral beliefs as allowed by the First Amendment, those people must be beaten into submission with all available means, including discrimination complaints and leftist judges who have apparently never read the Bill of Rights.
With this ruling, the state of Oregon has sent a message that a homosexual’s feelings matters more to them than the constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. I fully expect that one day this will be the case all over the nation. It may seem hard to believe, but with leftist judges advancing the homosexual agenda they are having great success getting homosexual marriage legalized, despite the wishes of the majority as stated in many ballot initiatives. The day may even come when pastors are charged with some form of hate speech for preaching against homosexuality from the pulpit. Crazy, you say? Perhaps, but earlier in my life I never would have dreamed there would be a day when two Christians would have to pay up to $150,000 for refusing to make a cake for some lesbians.
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