After a former pastor identified a bakery that refused to accept his challenge to make a cake saying “we do not support gay marriage,” the shop reported they had received death threats.
“We started getting some hundreds of phone calls and making very nasty and negative gestures towards our business, towards us,” said owner Sharon Haller, who filed a police report, according to WKMG on Friday.
The ex-pastor, Joshua Feuerstein, posted a video online of his request to Haller, identifying her shop. He said he did it to “expose the hypocrisy” of a bakery that would serve gay people but not provide him his message.
“He wanted us to put a hateful message on a cake and I said, we’re not gonna do that,” Haller told the WKMG.
Feuerstein told the station that he took the video down after the bakery told him to remove it.
The event mirrored the case of an Indiana pizza shop that this week announced it would not cater gay weddings, subsequently closed down
Like the pizza shop, the Florida bakery has collected money from sympathetic people with a GoFundMe page that has taken in about $4,000 at the time of this writing. (The pizza shop, meanwhile, closed in on nearly $1 million on Saturday.)
h/t Mediaite
No it doesn’t. It most decidedly does not mirror that case.
One is a request to dictate content – this Florida case – the other is a public business refusing to provide its product to a customer because the business owners are bigots.
While cake shops have to serve all fair paying customers, they can’t be made to carry forward the speech requests of said customers (i.e., they have to make you a cake, but they don’t have to put your hateful message on it).
I have to agree, except what I’m curious about is who set up the gofundme account?
Apparently, equating one bakery’s refusal to serve a customer who wishes to express their act of love with another bakery’s refusal to support an act of hatred … is the Christian thing to do.
It isn’t the Christian thing to do, but it IS the christianist thing to do.
If I was a cake shop presented with this kind of hate request, I would be happy to provide the requester with a blank cake in the requested colors and include in the price the icing in the color(s) the requester wants to add their own hateful message.
Don’t refuse them outright so they can play victim. Profit off the haters without participating in or supporting the hate.