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The Gresham couple who refused to make a wedding cake for a Portland lesbian couple is now sending cakes to LGBT organizations.
On the cakes? "We really do love you."
This is a somewhat different message than Aaron Klein sent when Laurel Bowman-Cryer asked for a wedding cake, and he allegedly quoted Leviticus: âThou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.â
Or, when he received the Bowman-Cryers' consumer complaint, which he reportedly posted on Facebook—including their full identifying information—with the message, "This is what happens when you tell gay people you won't do their 'wedding cake.'"
But maybe none of that fits on a little cake.
The Kleins and their business, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, were fined $135,000 after BOLI found they discriminated unlawfully against the Bowman-Cryers.
The couple spoke to Christian news site the Daily Signal, and Aaron Klein said, "We're doing this to show that we don't harbor hard feelings toward the narrative that's been put out about us. We don't want to see these people hurting."
Klein had been vociferously active on right-wing media during the dispute, while the Bowman-Cryers did not speak to the media until breaking their silence and telling their side of the story in an interview with WW July 22.
The Kleins sent the cakes to an odd array of LGBT groups. That includes everyone from the California LGBT Arts Alliance to Californians Against Hate and LGBT of Southern Nevada.
At least one of these, Californians Against Hate, doesn't currently exist in that form—it was a group formed against a 2008 ballot measure. None of the organizations are located in Oregon.
Brian Alexander, a volunteer at the LGBTQ Center of Long Beach, which received a cake, said they may have had a slightly different agenda in mind.
"There was also a video that came along with that," he said when WW called, "that said that being gay was a matter of choice and not something that's genetic. Apparently they want their position heard."
He says he didn't personally watch the video, however. The film, Audacity, by director Ray Comfort, currently sits in the gutter of IMDB's ratings, and is a feature-length attempt to prove that gays and lesbians are not born that way. It has been roundly pilloried by LGBT groups.
"It was nice of them to send the cake," says Alexander, "but it seems they had other things in mind."
WWeek 2015