GAY TRUTH

Did the Supreme Court punt or pass on religious freedom, or did it deliver a kick in the pants to lower courts? It’s tough to tell from the competing media reports, but the owners of the now-defunct Oregon bakery Sweetcakes by Melissa are off the hook for $135,000 in fines. The court vacated a lower-court ruling that upheld the fines against Melissa and Aaron Klein for refusing to work a same-sex wedding. The Supreme Court declined Monday to decide whether an Oregon baker can refuse on religious grounds to design a cake for a homosexual wedding – a question it carefully sidestepped last year. The case would have given the court’s conservative majority the chance to expand upon its narrow 2018 ruling in favor of a Colorado baker. That decision did not apply beyond the case of Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, who the justices said was discriminated against by state regulators. The new case involves Sweetcakes by Melissa, a custom cake business operated by Melissa a...

The Christian bakers fined and gagged by an Oregon labor tribunal for refusing to make a cake for a same-sex wedding have raised $355,000 on funding website  Continue To Give  in the last two weeks. They plan to appeal the ruling that helped shut down their storefront bakery. Aaron and Melissa Klein ran a family bakery for several years until 2013, when a lesbian couple, Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer, whom they had served many times, ordered a wedding cake. Aaron declined on religious grounds and swiftly found himself the target of a complaint lodged with the Oregon Bureau of Labor , a torrent of social media abuse, and a boycott. Though the family had hoped to pass on Sweet Cakes by Melissa to their five children, the boycott reduced them to working from their home kitchen and forced Aaron to take a job as a garbage collector. Labor commissioner Brad Avakian fined the Kleins $135,000 and ordered the couple  "to cease and desist from publishing, circul...