Oregon Wedding Cakes Are Just the Excuse

Theoretically, liberalism picks pluralism over public morality, nowhere more so than in the intimate realm of human sexuality.

 But the regulatory state has gotten so large, and so powerful, with such extensive reach into Americans’ livelihoods, that the Left cannot resist using it to impose its sexual moral views on the rest of us. 

Take Melissa and Aaron Klein, whose little Oregon bakery refused to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. It is not technically a crime to refuse to bake a gay wedding cake, so instead of being tried in a court of law, they were tried by the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries.

Why can gay bakers refuse to bake a Celebrate NOM (the National Organization for Marriage) cake, but Aaron and Melissa Klein must bake a gay wedding cake or pay the penalty? Because the regulatory state is now redirecting to this realm the powerful public-accommodations mechanisms that were strengthened to put an end to Jim Crow — the systematic, ugly attempt by powerful Southerners to deprive black people of equal opportunities in the economy and the culture.

 For African Americans, this was a horrendous problem. In 1906, Mary Church Terrell, an Oberlin grad and the daughter of two ex-slaves who rose to be successful Memphis business owners, gave a speech at the United Women’s Club in Washington, D.C., where she explained: 

As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head. . . . Indians, Chinamen, Filipinos, Japanese and representatives of any other dark race can find hotel accommodations, if they can pay for them. The colored man alone is thrust out of the hotels of the national capital like a leper. 

As a colored woman I may walk from the Capitol to the White House ravenously hungry and abundantly supplied with money with which to purchase a meal, without finding a single restaurant in which I would be permitted to take a morsel of food . . . 

As a colored woman, I cannot visit the tomb of the Father of this country . . . without being forced to sit in the Jim Crow section of an electric car . . . 

Nothing (thankfully) like this is happening to gay people. There is no complex of the economically and culturally powerful seeking to prevent their free access to ordinary American society. They have not only the courts but also the corporations on their side. Not only does Walmart fund gay-pride parades, its CEO publicly opposed Arkansas’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Via: National Review

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NOM Knew They Would Lose on Marriage Equality But They Don’t Care

It’s been a red-letter day for people who support equal rights under the law (also known as our Constitution’s 14th Amendment), but what about the conservatives who don’t? We’ve definitely been hearing from them today, but the statement from Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage sounds as if they knew they were fighting a losing battle, but don’t really care and will continue to fight that losing battle:

“Though expected, today’s decision is completely illegitimate. We reject it and so will the American people. It represents nothing but judicial activism, legislating from the bench, with a bare majority of the Justices on the Supreme Court exercising raw political power to impose their own preferences on marriage when they have no constitutional authority to do so. It is a lawless ruling that contravenes the decisions of over 50 million voters and their elected representatives. It is a decision that is reminiscent of other illegitimate Court rulings such as Dred Scott and Roe v Wade and will further plunge the Supreme Court into public disrepute.

“Make no mistake about it: The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) and countless millions of Americans do not accept this ruling. Instead, we will work at every turn to reverse it. The US Supreme Court does not have the authority to redefine something it did not create. Marriage was created long before the United States and our constitution came into existence. Our constitution says nothing about marriage. The majority who issued today’s ruling have simply made it up out of thin air with no constitutional authority. Today’s decision of the Supreme Court lacks both constitutional and moral authority. There is no eternal or natural law that allows for marriage to be redefined.”

The argument that SCOTUS has no right to make a decision like this always becomes a talking point, but then what is their function, exactly? And if the Court had ruled the way conservatives had wanted, would they still have the authority? And what about the majority of Americans who favor marriage equality?

 

NO. Brian Brown and his fellow conservatives don’t care about the details, apparently. So he can go ahead and keep fighting. And keep losing.

Via: Mediaite

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IRS Sued By The National Organization For Marriage For Leaking Tax Information

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) filed suit against the federal government and the Internal Revenue Service Thursday, claiming it had “irrefutable proof” someone within the agency illegally leaked the conservative organization’s confidential tax returns to its ideological opponents last year.

NOM is seeking damages from the disclosure, as well as to overturn a statute shielding the IRS from disclosing any information about the incident, according to a complaintfiled by the Act Right Legal Foundation on behalf of NOM in the Eastern District of Virginia Thursday.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) obtained the NOM’s 2008 tax returns in February 2012, which contained an unredacted list of donors, including presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

The president of the HRC became a national co-chair for the Obama reelection campaign in 2012 a day later.

NOM Chairman John Eastman said the group was able to remove redaction layers from the PDF documents that were leaked, showing that they came from within the IRS. The unauthorized disclosure of tax information is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

No criminal charges have been filed after 18 months. An internal investigation by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) was conducted, but the results were never released.

Via: WFB

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