Catholic farm family fights to stay out of gay-wedding business with help from Colorado baker

The Washington Times ^ | April 11, 2019 | Valerie Richardson

[jazusamo]

All Steve and Bridget Tennes want is to sell their apples, peaches and blueberries at a Michigan farmers’ market without being required to get into the gay-wedding business, and they’re hoping for an assist from Colorado baker Jack Phillips.

The Tenneses, who make their home on the Country Mill Farm with their six children, contend that their Catholic faith has been maligned by East Lansing officials who have sought to bar them from the farmers’ market over the couple’s refusal to host same-sex ceremonies on their property.

That’s where Mr. Phillips comes in. It was the state’s animus toward the Masterpiece Cakeshop owner that swung the Supreme Court’s decision last year in his favor after he refused to bake a same-sex wedding cake, and if anything, the hostility displayed by East Lansing officials is worse, said Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel John Bursch.

“In the Masterpiece case, the Supreme Court said unequivocally that when the government is hostile toward religion or religious believers, even when there’s a hint of hostility and animus, then that’s enough to invalidate government action,” said Mr. Bursch, who represents the farmers.

“Here you have government officials from the mayor to the city manager to the city council making repeated public remarks that the Catholic views on marriage are ‘ridiculous,’ they’re ‘absurd,’ and they should be changed,” he said. “The record is full of statements like that.”

The three-year-old fight goes before a federal judge Friday in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with Mr. Tennes seeking a permanent order prohibiting the liberal college town from blocking the family’s participation in the popular farmers’ market.

[jazusamo]

Mayor Mark Meadows and his leftists are really reaching on this.

[Lurkinanloomin]

The Supreme Court was pretty clear.
You can’t force your perversion on us.

[onedoug]

Jeez, if it isn’t muslims its queers.

[jazusamo]

MAGA!

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[Fido969]

Make them pay triple legal fees. Make them put some skin in the game.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I love Alliance Defending Freedom. They have a very good track record of winning against the left-wing bullies -— and winning big.

[daniel1212]

The Supreme Court was pretty clear. You can’t force your perversion on us.

Rather, SCOTUS fostered such by making it illegal in every state not to recognize homosexual marriage, and was was far from clear inb the Masterpiece case, choosing to use the hostility towards Phillips as the reason for its verdict, rather than vindicating him as they should have.

Kennedy's decision specifically noted the hostility towards Phillips made by the Commission as their reason to reverse the ruling, but because of the existence of this hostility in the current case, they could not rule on the broader issue regarding anti-discrimination law and the free exercise of religion. Kennedy stated that "[t]he outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts,...Kennedy's decision affirmed that there remains protection of same-sex couples and gay rights which states can still enforce through anti-discrimination laws, a point also agreed to by Ginsburg's dissent - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission#Analysis

Yet here is a case in which a baker refused to become complicit in celebrating a marriage that is not recognized by the law of God nor was it recognized by the highest law of the state at the time. But who was vindictively persecuted and prosecuted by the kangaroo Civil Rights commission.

[daniel1212]

So a black, Jewish or Muslim owner is not to be forced to rent a function hall to celebrate a KKK event, but no one can refuse to be complicit in celebrating a homosexual event by renting a hall, or creating a special work for that express purpose.

Why? Because SCOTUS has made it illegal to not recognize a perverse idea of marriage.

[Telepathic Intruder]

“We’re going to force you to sin, so that Hell will be less lonely for us”.

[tbw2]

The problem with citing “hostility” as the Constitutional violation is that is suggests if they’re civil while telling him to obey LBGT#*(@&& demands, it is OK.

[lastchance]

The couple’s farm is outside of East Lansing jurisdiction. So frankly the ordinance the douche nozzles from East Lansing are claiming must be followed is not applicable to them in the least. Also if the vendor guidelines were re-written for the express purpose of banning the family such punitive actions do not usually pass the smell test in court.

[northislander]

To hell with all these pervs and their enablers...

[daniel1212]

>>The problem with citing “hostility” as the Constitutional violation is that is suggests if they’re civil while telling him to obey LBGT#*(@&& demands, it is OK. <<

Which was by making an immoral behavior a civil right, so that opposing it in no less than even marriage became the new racism, which SCOTUS infamously (but not unanimously) made federal law. “there is no lawful basis for a State to refuse to recognize a lawful same-sex marriage performed in another State on the ground of its same-sex character.”

“rather than focusing on the People’s understanding of “liberty”—at the time of ratification or even today—the majority focuses on four “principles and traditions” that, in the majority’s view, prohibit States from defining marriage as an institution consisting of one man and one woman.” ...”The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003.[20] They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since.” - Scalia Dissent - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/576/14-556/

Yet this is a result of America largely casting away its moral anchor, that of the Bible and its basic faith being the implicitly held standard for morality, which so many founders overall affirmed. I close with a poem:

There’s freedom in America, the land of the red white and blue;

but there still must be laws, things you just can’t do.

You can’t marry your sister, your brother, or the family pet;

a sheep, or a goat - at least not yet!

That how is it with homosexuality, what the Bible calls sodomy;

men lying with men as with women, is perversity!

That they’re not designed that way, tis easy to perceive,

but yielding to sinful desires, man is soon deceived.

A moral wrong is not a civil right; like the sin itself, that’s confusion;

calling evil good and exchanging light for darkness, is sure delusion!

History tells us where this will lead, from societies now in dust,

When a nation casts off the laws of God, and follows it’s own lusts.

Promoting a sin which sends one to Hell from an early grave,

dishonors God and robs man of the Life He gave.

There’s but one answer: the Risen Jesus gave Himself for our sins;

Repent and believe, then truly follow Him!

[daniel1212]

if the vendor guidelines were re-written for the express purpose of banning the family such punitive actions do not usually pass the smell test in court.

Normally true, but the downward trajectory of Liberal courts is on that makes a stench from Hell to be a protected fragrance.

History and tradition guide and discipline the inquiry but do not set its outer boundaries. When new insight reveals discord between the Constitution’s central protections and a received legal stricture, a claim to liberty must be addressed. [=] Same-sex couples have the same right as opposite-sex couples to enjoy intimate association...[=] they too may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage. - Obergefell v. Hodges Kennedy Opinion.

[Buffalo Bob]

"Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666."

—Revelation 13

[lastchance]

Alas, so many judges are tainted with support for the culture of death.

On Obergell. That opinion has never made one bit of sense to me. I am surprised that a solid document such as the Constitution could be stretched so out of shape without snapping in two. Though I rather think that may be the goal of the Left.

Come to think of it since when has sexual intimacy been an unfettered right for anybody?

[daniel1212]

Come to think of it since when has sexual intimacy been an unfettered right for anybody?

In the light of simply the medical aspects of MSM (male homosexual relations), what would the reaction be by the media if the partakers in a religious consensual practice. such as the Lord's supper. were responsible for approx. 80% of new HIV cases, despite constituting approximately 4% of the population, and primarily responsible for the death of around 700,000, and with treatment costing hundreds of thousands of doctors, including via welfare programs?