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After six years and hundreds of celebratory confections,
it wasn’t the economy, the stiff competition, financing, or any of the
other usual road bumps of building a new business that caused Sweet
Cakes by Melissa—a husband-and-wife bakery in Portland, Oregon area—to
close its doors at the end of the summer.
In January, co-owner Aaron Klein had denied a request to bake a cake for a lesbian wedding. “The Bible tells us to flee from sin,” his wife and business namesake, Melissa Klein told a Fox News columnist recently. “I don’t think making a cake for it helps. Protests, boycotts, and a storm of media attention—much of it negative—ensued. The couple received death threats. Then, activists broadened the boycott: any wedding vendor that did business with Sweet Cakes would be targeted.
The final nail in the coffin came in August when the slighted lesbian couple filed an anti-discrimination suit with the state. “The LGBT attacks are the reason we are shutting down the shop. They have killed our business through mob tactics,” Klein said. His wife added: “I guess in my mind I thought we lived in a lot nicer of a world where everybody tolerated everybody.”
Christian Wedding Vendors Under Attack
In 2006, a noted advocate for traditional marriage, Maggie Gallagher, warned that the legalization of same-sex marriage would lead to constraints on religious freedom. Writing in the Weekly Standard, Gallagher saw the end of adoptions services by Boston Catholic Charities as a foreshadowing of things to come. (To retain its license, Gallagher explained, the agency would have to abide by the state’s anti-discrimination law, which had been extended to married same-sex couples.) She couched her warning in the form of a question:
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Stephen Beale is a freelance writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a former news editor at GoLocalProv.com and was a correspondent for the New Hampshire Union Leader, where he covered the 2008 presidential primary. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN and the Today Show and his writing has been published in the Washington Times, Providence Journal, the National Catholic Register and on MSNBC.com and ABCNews.com.
A native of Topsfield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Brown University in 2004 with a degree in classics and history.
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