| Thought criminals: Melissa and Aaron Klein (center) with their children. |
Via William Grigg @ Prolibertate
By declining to make a wedding cake for Rachel Cryer and
Laurel Bowman, Aaron Klein and his wife Melissa saved the lesbian couple
roughly $350. This is a case in which discrimination on the part of a business
materially benefited the supposed victims – even before a Soviet-grade “civil
rights” bureaucrat in Oregon ordered
the business owners to pay $135,000 to the aggrieved couple.
In January 2013, the Kleins, who operated a bakery called “Sweetcakes
by Melissa,” turned down the couple’s business proposal. Within a few days, the
would-be customers contracted with another bakery called Pastry Girl. The
second vendor charged $250 to create the celebratory confection, a rather
garish artifact “with three tiers that had a peacock’s body on top and the
peacock’s tail feathers trailing down over tiers to the cake plate,” as described
in the Final Ruling by the
Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI).
Had they accepted the job, the Kleins “would
have charged $600 for making and delivering the same cake.”Rachel Cryer offered her business to Sweetcakes because two
years earlier the Kleins had designed and produced a wedding cake for her
mother. If the Kleins had acted out of mercenary motivations rather than being
governed by their religious convictions, Rachel and Laurel most likely would
have settled for their first choice, rather than testing the market and quickly
finding another vendor who produced the desired cake at less than half the
price.
By forgoing the transaction, the Kleins paid a fairly sizeable
“opportunity
cost” in the service of their beliefs while inflicting no injury on Rachel
and Laurel. In fact, they actually did the couple a considerable favor in light
of the fact that they wanted a ceremony “as `big and grand as they could
afford,’” according
to the BOLI’s account. The hundreds of dollars saved on a cake were thus
available to be spent on other facets of the event.
By declining to participate, however, the Kleins had hurt
the couple’s feelings. As members of an officially recognized victim group in
the People’s Republic of Oregon, Rachel and Laurel had the ability to summon
official retaliation against someone whose opinions offended them. This also
provided an opportunity for Rachel’s mother, Cheryl McPherson, a recovering “homophobe,”
to display her righteousness.
After the awkward conversation in which Aaron Klein had
explained that he and his wife had religious scruples against involvement in a
same-sex wedding ceremony, Cheryl paid a second visit for the apparent purpose
of persuading Klein to change his mind. She
described to the BOLI how she told Aaron that “she used to think like him,
but her `truth had changed’ as a result of having `two gay children.’” In
reiterating his decision, Klein – who from all accounts was polite and
otherwise deferential – reportedly referred to the proscription against
homosexual conduct found in the Old Testament book of Leviticus.
When she returned to the car where Rachel was waiting,
Cheryl told her tearful daughter that Klein “had called her `an abomination.’”
This was untrue: Cheryl’s sworn testimony made it plain that Klein had referred
to an act, not to an individual, as an “abomination.” It was
also counterproductive, assuming that the intent had been to console her
daughter, rather than to exacerbate her sorrow and amplify her sense of
outrage.
Cheryl drove Rachel back to the apartment she shared with
Laurel and repeated the claim that Klein had described them as “abominations.”
Laurel interpreted the act of refusing to make the cake as a statement that she
was “a creature not created by God, not created with a soul,” that she and
Rachael were “unworthy of holy love [and] not worthy of life” – conclusions based
entirely on her own perceptions, rather than anything Klein had said or done.
She was also concerned that exposure to Klein’s religious views “might
negatively impact [Cheryl’s] acceptance of [her daughter’s] sexual orientation.”
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