The Court of Appeals announced its decision Thursday to uphold a $135,000 fine issued to bakery owners who refused to make a cake for a lesbian couple.
Melissa and Aaron Klein had refused to bake a cake Rachel Bowman-Cryer and her wife, Laurel back in February 2013.
They ended up closing the store several months later due to backlash, but continued the business from home with the help of online donations.
Melissa Klein ended her online business as well.
"We lost everything we loved and worked so hard to build," said Melissa Klein. "I loved my shop. It meant everything to me and losing it has been so hard for me and my family."
The state ruled Sweet Cakes had discriminated against the lesbian couple, and in July 2015, Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian ordered the Kleins pay $135,000 for emotional damages suffered.
The Kleins have already paid the $135,000 in damages, but that money was held in a government escrow pending the appeal court's decision.
The Oregon Equality Act of 2007 says businesses cannot discriminate or refuse service based on sexual orientation - just as they cannot turn away customers because of their race, sex, disability, age, or religion.
TinFoilRobotProphet on December 29th, 2017 at 01:07 UTC »
"If you don't want to do something you just do it half-assed. That's the American way."
- Homer J. Simpson
lessthanclever03 on December 28th, 2017 at 23:11 UTC »
I just had my pre-law students write about the Colorado case for their final. One thing I keep seeing in this thread is that a lot of people think bakers should have to sell gay couples any cake that they'd make for a straight couple. I think this overlooks a tough issue the Justices were grappling with during the oral argument: that the meaning of speech depends not just on the form it takes, but the context that form appears in.
Alito raised an interesting question about this. Suppose a bakery makes a cake celebrating a couple's anniversary, and it says "November 9th--best day ever!" Then some Nazis celebrating Kristallnacht come up and ask for the exact same cake. Can the bakery refuse to make the same cake because it would express a different message in that context?
Here are a few other hypotheticals.
A bakery makes a straight couple a custom wedding cake saying "God smiles on your marriage." Can they refuse to make an identical cake for a gay couple's wedding?
Can a singer refuse to sing "Born this way" at a wedding between gay people when they'd sing the same song at a wedding between straight ones?
A baker makes a cake saying "Love is love" for a wedding between gay people. Then NAMBLA requests an identical cake for one of their conventions. Can the baker refuse?
One other thing I should mention is that I've seen a lot of people say that gay people are a protected class under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. That's not right. They arguably should be one, going by the description in Carolene Products footnote 4, but there's no judicial decision granting them that status. As the law stands right now, laws harming gay people are evaluated using rational basis review, not strict or intermediate scrutiny.
I hoped Obergefell v. Hodges would make gay people a protected class, but instead it was decided largely on substantive due process grounds. Instead of a decision about how bad it is to discriminate against gay people Kennedy wrote one about how great it is to marry people.
EDIT: I'm gonna respond to some of these other comments later, but let me add something here about the "protected class" stuff. A couple people have pointed out that gay people are a protected class according to the Oregon law, and that's right. Legally, if the baker has 1st Amendment protection, it doesn't matter at all if Oregon law considers gay people a protected class.
If gay people were a protected class under the 14th Amendment, then the legal case would be tougher and a court might balance the baker's 1st Amendment rights against the couple's 14th Amendment rights. I'm actually not sure how the legal analysis would go if gay people were a protected class in constitutional law, I'd have to look some things up to figure it out. It might be an open question.
The moral questions are completely different from the legal ones, and the moral ones are more important. I just mention this legal stuff because people often assume the law is the way they think it ought to be, so they don't realize they need to try to change it.
Munz01 on December 28th, 2017 at 20:46 UTC »
Didn't the bakery owners get the gofundme money to pay for this?