Oregon official confirms: bakery owners must pay $135K over same-sex wedding cake
July 06, 2015
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Upholding an earlier decision, Oregon’s state labor commissioner has ruled that the owners of an Oregon bakery violated a non-discrimination law when one of its owners declined to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple.
The official confirmed that the owners are personally liable for $135,000 in damages for mental and emotional suffering.
“This case is not about a wedding cake or a marriage,” said State Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian. “It is about a business's refusal to serve someone because of their sexual orientation. Under Oregon law, that is illegal.”
Avakian also ordered the owners to cease “publishing, issuing, circulating or displaying ... any communication, notice, advertisement or sign of any kind to the effect that any of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, services or privileges of a place of public accommodation will be refused, withheld from or denied to, or that any discrimination will be made against, any person on account of sexual orientation.”
He added, “Within Oregon's public accommodations law is the basic principle of human decency that every person, regardless of their sexual orientation, has the freedom to fully participate in society. The ability to enter public places, to shop, to dine, to move about unfettered by bigotry.”
The Oregonian reported that the owners of the bakery, now closed, said on their Facebook page:
We will NOT give up this fight, and we will NOT be silenced. We stand for God's truth, God's word and freedom for ALL [A]mericans. We are here to obey God not man, and we will not conform to this world. If we were to lose everything it would be totally worth it for our Lord who gave his one and only son, Jesus, for us! God will win this fight!
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Further information:
- Sweet Cakes: State orders Oregon bakery owners to pay $135,000 for denying service to same-sex couple (The Oregonian)
- Final Order Issued In Oregon Same-Sex Wedding Cake Refusal (Religion Clause)
- Bakery owners ordered to pay $135,000 over same-sex wedding cake (CWN, 4/28)
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Posted by: Randal Mandock -
Jul. 06, 2015 5:41 PM ET USA
"'This case is not about a wedding cake or a marriage...It is about a business's refusal to serve someone because of their sexual orientation.'" At the heart of marriage is the conjugal act. A marriage is not consummated until the act is accomplished. Presumably a civil marriage has the same expectation; else it would not be marriage but rather another form of contract. The owner's refusal was not based on orientation, but on act. The owner would not condone the act of unnatural vice.
