Oregon bakery that refused to make gay wedding cake raises $352K

An Oregon bakery that was fined for refusing to prepare a cake for a same-sex wedding has raised $352,500 in around two months, setting a record for the website that hosted its fundraising campaign.

Sweet Cakes by Melissa, a bakery owned by Aaron and Melissa Klein, originally began a crowdfunding campaign on the website GoFundMe after the businesses was shuttered in 2013, but was kicked off the site in April due to complaints from same-sex marriage supporters. In the Kleins’ time on GoFundMe they raised $109,000, which they were permitted to keep after the site changed its policy to ban their campaign.


The Kleins then began another campaign on the website Continue to Give on May 5, which bills itself as “a faith based giving platform” and asked for donations to support their family in the wake of their bakery’s closing and subsequent legal battles. The founder of Continue to Give, Jesse Wellhoefer, told the Washington Times that the Klein family has already broken the three-year-old site’s record for highest total raised and is continuing to raise funds.

The couple originally began crowdfunding after the Oregon labor commissioner ordered them to pay $135,000 in damages to a same-sex couple. Laurel and Rachel Bowman-Cryer, the couple in question, requested a cake from the shop for a commitment ceremony in June 2013, but were denied by the Kleins, who cited their religious beliefs as prohibiting them from taking part in the celebration.

Sweet Cakes by Melissa has become a symbol for many on the Christian right who are now launching a campaign to push back against the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision and pursue exemptions for religious organizations and individuals to refuse to participate in same-sex wedding ceremonies. The bakery has been featured in numerous conservative news outlets’ articles, one of which was linked to by Mike Huckabee in an op-ed for USA Today.

“Even prior to this Supreme Court decision, there are many examples of businesses fined, penalized or economically terrorized because the owners held to their convictions about marriage based on their religious views,” Huckabee wrote.

Another socially conservative Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz, likewise has said that “2016 will be the religious liberty election” and has said that “the modern Democratic party has decided that their commitment to mandatory gay marriage in all 50 states trumps any willingness to defend the First Amendment.”

Chief Justice John Roberts in his dissenting opinion issued in June warned of oncoming legal battles pitting religious liberty objections against the rights of same-sex couples established in the court’s decision. His colleague, Justice Samuel Alito, went further and said that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority decision will be “used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.”

This article tagged under: Gay Marriage

Oregon

Bakery