Just because Mormons sometimes wear bakers hats doesn't mean they are bakers.
Why do they think the Supreme Court will take them seriously? If you take "religious freedom" out of the equation it makes more sense. Businesses don't need a law making them serve customers. So STFU and just say that.
There are many cases where one person in a hetrosexual marriage wants to live a mormon lifestyle and be sincere in their religious beliefs, while the other person (man or woman) wants to be a complete whore, drunk, and/or other things that completely destroys the family structure because the person believes that their lifestyle is acceptable. In these cases, the church may excommunicate this person, but the church doesn't exclude the kids in those hetrosexual-parents families from joining the church, and make them disparage their parent's lifestyle before they can join the church as adults. So the question is this. In both cases (hetrosexual person vs gay person making choices to destroy a mormon family structure), why does the church only punish the kids who live in a gay marriage family?
I don't buy the claim to legal issues excuse that the church gives. If a child in a sunday school class hears someone disparage single mothers who sleep around and the child knows that their mother does sleep around, that child will feel bad, might tell his mother, the church might be sued. If everyone else speaks respectfully of others in church, even when disagreeing with the person's life choices because of religious beliefs, no one gets sued, including the church. To sum things up, the church changed the rules involving children living in gay-marriage-households not because they feared being sued after acting as the christians they claim to be. The church changed the rules because they want the right to exercise blatent dis-respect towards others who are not exactly what they expect them to be. So if you love a gay parent and don't want to see anyone mock and belittle them, you're out. In fact, you were never in, to begin with. Some religion huh?
The "Religious Freedom" argument can open up a Pandora's box full of other types of discrimination. An example would be a White Supremacist who believes in the Christian Identity belief system. Even though the doctrine is overtly racist, it is still considered a religious belief.
An African American or a Jew goes to a bakery to have a custom wedding cake made for their wedding. The White Supremacist baker refuses their business because he believes that they are an inferior race. Do we protect his discriminatory behavior also because of his religious beliefs? I believe we shouldn't. Businesses owners should offer services or merchandise to everyone. Any kind of discriminatory behavior should be against the law.
I really don't care if they refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple. But I think they should have to display a sign that says they refuse to serve GLBT or whomever else they refuse. That way those of us who do not want to do business with homophobes or racists or whatever, will have the information we need to know who to and not to give our business to.
Yeah. It would be required. And hopefully everyone will take pictures of it and post it all over Facebook. It's not 1929 and it would NOT be good for business like it was then.
When DH and I were married, I had ordered a fairly ordinary wedding cake, done in our wedding colors. I wanted to top it with fresh flowers, which I provided.
While it was a hetero wedding, the cake would not have given anyone a clue, either way. No names, no statuettes - I don't even think we had the date on it.
A longtime friend of mine, in California, married his partner of 33 years back when gay marriage became legal on the Federal level. I hadn't given them any advice about the cake, but they did basically the same thing I did. Standard wedding cake. Nothing to suggest the genders of the persons being married.
I was so thrilled about their wedding that I found the prettiest wedding card I could - and it was not easy to find one that did not refer to the "bride and groom" - and shipped it off right away. They like the card so much that it became the frontispiece for their wedding album.
They told me to marry him and then they did that. My daughter is TBM and she gets along with her dad a lot better than she does me, yet she still is TBM. I don't know how she deals with that in reality. I guess living in Alaska and away from all the Utah mormons helps her live in her bubble.
The truth is that any mormon who thinks they can stay mormon and love their gay family members is lying to themselves. Like I told someone once, "You are supporting our abusers." They don't seem to get that.