Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Of Wedding Cakes and Puritanical Collectivism

 
 
 
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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