Can’t Have Your Cake, Gays Are Told, and a Rights Battle Rises

LAKEWOOD, Colo. — Jack Phillips is a baker whose evangelical Protestant faith informs his business. There are no Halloween treats in his bakery — he does not see devils and witches as a laughing matter. He will not make erotic-themed pastries — they offend his sense of morality. And he declines cake orders for same-sex weddings because he believes Christianity teaches that homosexuality is wrong.

Can’t Have Your Cake, Gays Are Told, and a Rights Battle Rises CAKE-videoSixteenByNine540

Can’t Have Your Cake, Gays Are Told, and a Rights Battle Rises CAKE-videoSixteenByNine540

Mr. Phillips, whose refusal two years ago to make a cake for a gay male couple has led to a court battle now getting underway, is one of a small number of wedding vendors across the country who are emerging as the unlikely face of faith-based resistance to same-sex marriage.

The refusals by the religious merchants — bakers, florists and photographers, for example — have been taking place for several years. But now local governments are taking an increasingly hard line on the issue, as legislative debates over whether to protect religious shop owners are overtaken by administrative efforts to punish them.

In Colorado, where Mr. Phillips, 58, owns and operates a small bakery called Masterpiece Cakeshop, the State Civil Rights Commission determined that Mr. Phillips had violated a state law banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in places of public accommodation. The commission ordered Mr. Phillips to retrain all of his employees, who include his 87-year-old mother, and to produce a quarterly report detailing any refusals to bake; in response, he has stopped accepting orders for any wedding cakes while he appeals the ruling to the state courts.

“I do like doing the wedding cakes,” he said. “But I don’t like having the government tell me which ones I can make and which ones I can’t make, and trying to control that part of my life.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/us/cant-have-your-cake-gays-are-told-and-a-rights-battle-rises.html?_r=0

Victory

But , but ... he freely chose to be a wedding cake maker, and baking cakes for all kinds of weddings is his job, the law says so!

Muttley

Can’t Have Your Cake, Gays Are Told, and a Rights Battle Rises

Can’t Have Your Cake, Gays Are Told, and a Rights Battle Rises

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