Conservatives raise thousands online for Indiana pizzeria owners

Conservative TV station TheBlaze TV has set up a crowdsourced online fundraising account for the proprietors of Memories Pizza after the family told reporters it had been harassed since coming out as the first Indiana business owners to say they would not serve their pies to same-sex weddings.

“We’re basically in hiding,” Crystal O’Connor told TheBlaze TV.


O’Connor — who on Tuesday praised Gov. Mike Pence for signing the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act, said her Walkerton, Indiana, business would “have to say no” to serving a same-sex wedding — now says she and her family have considered leaving the state after facing death threats.

“I don’t know if we will reopen or if we can,” O’Connor said of her business, adding she now has “no income coming in at all.”

“We’re very hurt and confused and we stood up for what we believe and … the news took it totally out of proportion,” O’Connor said.

After interviewing O’Connor, TheBlaze TV created a GoFundMe.com account to raise money for the family, citing a goal of $25,000. A day later, the account had received more than $400,000.

Almost immediately after O’Connor’s original comments first circulated online, opponents came flocking to the review site Yelp to voice their opinions.

“Food tastes like discrimination,” one reviewer wrote.

One person even purchased the domain name www.memoriespizza.com and created a fake website to mock the pizza shop.

O’Connor told TheBlaze TV that the media had also surrounded her home.

“They lied about it,” she said of media reports. “We said we would serve anyone that walked in that door, even gays, but we would not condone a wedding. We would not cater that, because of our religious beliefs.”

According to Lawrence Jones, a “television opinion contributor” for TheBlaze TV, the station started the fund to help the family “get through this assault.”

“Our goal was simply to help take one thing off this family’s plate as the strangers sought to destroy them,” Jones said.