It certainly wasn’t the text message Candice Lowe was expecting to get on her honeymoon. She says it came from the owner of Take the Cake Bakery in Toledo, canceling the order for her wife’s birthday cake. Lowe says, “after she saw my Facebook page, she found out that I was in a same-sex marriage and she could not do my cake.”…. “She did all of their effort to get a cake and gets a text message and has to tell me her surprise, it kind of ruined our day,” Amanda Lowe said of her wife….”It wasn’t a wedding cake, it was just a birthday cake,” Candice said. “A birthday cake has nothing to do with your sexual preference.”
I recently wrote about Laurel and Rachel Bowman-Cryer, for whom a Portland-area bakery refused to provide a wedding cake because they object to same-sex marriage for “religious reasons.” The Bowman-Cryers aren’t the first LGBT couple to experience this sort of thing, nor evidently were they the last. The latest incident to come to light involves a baker in Toledo, OH, who refused to provide a BIRTHDAY cake to a lesbian couple.
My first reaction upon reading this story (well, second…after revulsion) was to wonder why and how it is that someone who professes to be a follower of Jesus Christ- who preached love, tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion- would think it “Christian” to discriminate in this manner. If you sincerely believe that your Christian faith allows you to discriminate against those who live, love, think, and/or believe differently than you…YERDOONITRONG!
It’s one thing to object to homosexuality and/or marriage equality on a moral basis. It’s a free country, and a citizen is free to such opinions as they deem appropriate. When one determines it to be within reason to discriminate against someone because of their sexuality and/or lifestyle (“RELIGIOUS FREEDOM!!”), that’s as repulsive as it is decidedly unChristian.
When a business person declines to provide a service to an LGBT person or couple that they’d readily provide to anyone else, that’s discrimination, and it has no place in the practice of true Christianity. A follower of Jesus Christ who’s actually made an effort to read the Gospel would understand that their Lord and Savior wasn’t about judgment or intolerance. He modeled love for all- the sick, the lame, the poor, the marginalized- and there’s no ambiguity in what the Gospel says about love and acceptance.
Perhaps the proprietor of Take the Cake Bakery slept through the sermons at her church covering the Gospel. Or perhaps she’s just a hateful, intolerant homophobe who believes her faith allows her to elevate herself above those whose sexuality and/or lifestyle she finds repulsive.
It’s not just our weddings they object to. It’s our existence. Refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding says, “I don’t think you people should be able to celebrate or solemnize your relationships because same-sex marriage is a sin.”
Refusing to bake a birthday cake for a lesbian says, “I don’t think your birth is something to celebrate because the world would be better off if you didn’t exist.”
Welcome to America — where bigoted bakers do background checks to avoid selling cakes to lesbians (because Jesus) but we don’t require merchants at gun shows to do background checks to avoid selling weapons of war to crazed terrorists, abusive spouses, and the mentally ill (because freedom).
America- the land of the free, where a citizen may live, love, think, and/or believe as they choose…unless you happen to differ from the White, Conservative, Christian, heterosexual majority.
Savage is correct in his assessment regarding the bakery owner’s likely preference that those who identify as LGBT not exist. That such a label encompasses those who, like her, are human beings with hope and dreams, people they love and who love them seem not to matter to someone convinced her religious faith makes her a superior moral being.
I can’t help but wonder how her Lord and Savior would react to Lowe twisting His teachings in order to justify using her prejudice and homophobia as justification for treating the LGBT community as second class, unworthy even of a birthday cake.
And people wonder why I’m good without God….
