Yes, Liberals, We Should Sue That Anti-Gay Florist

I was prepared for religious conservatives to start thrashing back when Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a consumer protection lawsuit Tuesday against a florist who refused to sell a gay couple flowers for their wedding. Right on cue, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) tried to canonize Baronelle Stutzman, who owns Arlene's Flowers & Gifts in Richland, Washington, by saying she's "being forced out of the public square." Then the Family Policy Institute of Washington jumped in to decry the state's anti-discrimination law, which is used as the basis for the lawsuit and was passed in 2006, as "bad then... bad now." The group, naturally, is trying to help Stutzman's legal defense.

I also expected a backlash against Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed, who were turned away on March 1 due to Stutzman's "relationship with Jesus," for threatening to file their own lawsuit. Ingersoll and Freed announced Wednesday that Stutzman must choose between apologizing, promising to never discriminate again, and paying $5,000 to an LGBT youth center or facing a civil rights lawsuit. As the ACLU, the state's attorney general, and lots of other lawyers have argued, the couple is entitled to bring an anti-discrimination case for being denied service based on their sexual orientation in a place of public accommodation (the same way a business can't deny service based on a client's race, religion, or gender). But NOM cited one of my recent posts about the couple's potential suit to make the point "whenever marriage is redefined, it’s the end of full religious liberty."

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Because, you know, any shopkeeper in America should be able to use the Bible as their sole justification for turning away gays. That's the same way they tried to use the Bible to bar women from voting booths and mixed-race couples from wedding chapels. Even though they lost those fights, this—flowers for gay people—this is the end of all religious liberty.

I'm used to this brand of crazy.

But I wasn't expecting so many murmurs from other people—gay people and liberal people—who are tsk-tsking Attorney General Ferguson and the couple. These critics are prolific in social media and comment threads saying that legal action against Stutzman will just fulfill the bigots' prophesies, or that gay-rights activists are playing into NOM's hand by making Stutzman a martyr. They say this is the wrong lawsuit over a non-essential transaction. They say it's a mistake.

"This is just becoming the stupidest thing ever," one commenter writes on Slog. "Why couldn't they just go to another florist and give the rest of us a heads up to boycott this joint? You want a written apology? Really? Instead this crap is going to be dragged to the courts, and get all the other anti-gay nut jobs all worked up about the threat we pose to their freedom of blah blah blah."

And another one wrote: "If this plays out poorly—and let's face it, how else is forcing a poor grandma to violate her church instead of buying flowers from the shop next door going to play out?—then we'll set back the culture war at least ten years."

As a friend of mine also wrote to me about the couple's lawsuit, "Let's not pretend this is in the same ball park as a segregated lunch counter. This is just piling it on, perpetuating the 'Christian victim' meme."

Then there's another person who said that even though the "florist is a bigot," the strategy should be to "Embarrass her. Boycott her. Vote with your wallet. But speaking only for myself, I'd rather we save the legal, financial, and cultural resources that we've amassed for bigger battles than this. I'd rather we sue the bastards who fire us for being gay."

I'm sorry, but mal-fucking-arkey.

The Christian right may have set up that stupid political framing—"We'll be denied our precious right to discriminate!!"—but it doesn't mean they actually get to discriminate. It also doesn't mean progressives should roll out the red carpet the first time some hateful Bible thumper turns away gay customers. Activists and lawmakers hustled their butts for over a decade to include sexual orientation in our state's anti-discrimination statute. We went to the mat to pass gay marriage. What's the point of those victories if we're willing to give up what we've just won? Who are those laws for if we turn our backs on the people being refused service? We didn't pass those laws as feelgood keepsakes for gay-ol' Seattle, where we don't need 'em. Those laws are essential for the gays toughing it out in the hateful hinterlands. Failing to sue would set a precedent that the anti-discrimination law—which Senator Cal Anderson fought his entire career to pass, it bears mentioning—isn't worth shit because the gays are too fucking cowardly to enforce it.

Still, some fags are mewling that lawsuits aren't the the way to win the war of public opinion, that we should be fighting bigger battles. One of my friends said we should consider public accommodations to be necessities, like hospital visitation or lunch, but not flowers.

But this isn't about flowers.

It's actually about the Christian right seeing how far they can push this envelope. The line between trivial product and necessary service is an impossibly broad gray area. But if you believe same-sex marriage is a right, then consider the products and services that society defines as essential to that wedding. It's not a seat on the bus or a seat at the lunch counter—but it's just as important. It is a reception hall, a dress, a tux, a bouquet. And if you believe gay people can be denied those things by anyone hiding behind a Bible, then gay weddings are second-class weddings.

Where would you draw the line? Flowers, rental cars, gas pumps, motel rooms, hospital beds. We as a society wouldn't stand idly by if a stock broker refused to take an investor because she's a woman, if a bowling alley refused to rent shoes to a man because he's too short, a gourmet delicatessen turned away a shopper because she was Catholic. The coffee at those lunch counters is also non-essential. Gays don't deserve a lower standard or a wider gray area.

The liberal apologists say the Christian right is going to rally around this case just as they have before—such as the New Mexico photographer sued for refusing to work at a gay wedding or the baker who could have been sued for refusing a cake—but, excuse me, all that rallying around their martyrs doesn't seem to be hurting gay marriage. Four states voted by popular election for the first time ever in favor of gay marriage last fall. If anything, the more those people complain, the stronger the gay marriage movement seems to become.

Others argue it's too soon to uphold the law with a high-profile legal case because we may lose the support we've got. But Loving v. Virginia made interracial marriage the law of the land decades before most Americans agreed and Roe v. Wade made women's contraception the law despite a nonstop backlash (and in both cases, mixed-race couples have been happier and women have had access to safe abortions). I don't mean to say those fights are over—they're not—but those legal cases were better fought and won than never fought at all.

When gay marriage was on the ballot, a lot of people said human rights shouldn't be put up to a vote, because the rights of a gay couple shouldn't be subject to the whims of public opinion. If you agree with that, you also agree that anti-gay discrimination laws shouldn't be put up to a test of public opinion, shouldn't be subject to the results of a focus group or a poll or a marketing agency, but a test of Constitutional fairness and of law. Even if it's unpopular, it's the right thing to do.

So I'm glad that the straight people who run the ACLU and our straight attorney general (and the gay couple) have the guts to take this to a judge. When there is a good law, we should enforce it. And where there isn't a law, we should not tolerate a hateful culture (hello, pro sports!). Racism used to be tolerated at lunch counters and on buses and sports fields, too, until we said it wasn't anymore. (It may exist, true, but it's officially condemned.) The alternative is accepting these bigoted standards forever. There will be growing pains. There will be backlash. Bigots will try to deny us service and tell gay football players to stay in the closet, but so what?

AG Ferguson put it simply when he was talking about his decision to file the case: "Right now she's getting away with it, and that sends the wrong message to all the businesses around the state."

Suing Stutzman sends the right message: You can't get away with this. But backing down as a short-term calculation that this isn't the right strategy sends another message: keep discriminating against gay couples. Keep telling gays to stay in the closet. Keep bullying gay teenagers. We won't stop you. That's absolutely the wrong message.

So bring on the lawsuits.