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| Joshua Feuerstein |
On video, he recorded a phone conversation he had with Florida bakery Cut the Cake. He asked if they would make him a sheet cake saying “We do not support gay marriage.” The woman on the other end said they wouldn’t do that and hung up. After that, Feuerstein proceeded to identify the bakery in question and made his point about the religious freedom issue.As of this writing, Cut the Cake has raised $7,900. Just to update the total a bit from that earlier story.
At one point, he said, “Gay marriage isn’t even illegal. It’s called marriage. If you’re a gay man and you want to be married, guess what? Just go find a woman and get married.”
Feuerstein encouraged viewers to call the bakery and and help “expose the hypocrisy” they’re supposedly engaging in. Well, in a parallel of what happened to Memories Pizza in Indiana, Cut the Cake ended up receiving quite a lot of angry messages, including death threats.
Sharon Haller, who Feuerstein spoke to on the phone, said, “We started getting some hundreds of phone calls and making very nasty and negative gestures towards our business, towards us.”
Feuerstein took down the video at their request, but Cut the Cake posted it online so people could see it, along with a GoFundMe page that has raised, as of this posting, over $2000.
What is with people??
First, outside of a few local communities, Florida does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. That means that you could call any bakery or florist or hotel or whatever and find that they are free and clear to discriminate against you if you are a part of the LGBT communities. They might suffer social media backlash, but Florida's government doesn't care about you discriminating in this fashion.
Second, it's bullshitty for people like Joshua Feuerstein or Steven Crowder to seek out these businesses and secretly set them up, record them without their knowledge, and then encourage others to disrupt their businesses. At least in the cases of Memories Pizza or these Georgia flower shops, they agreed to be publicly interviewed by television stations. It's stupid that people are attacking these anti-gay businesses, but they volunteered for this moment on the news. Cut the Cake and those various Muslim bakeries didn't.
Lastly, people need to get over themselves. It's not cool to shut down a business because they communicate something that you disagree with. If they break some ordinance, then file a complaint against them. But it's ridiculous that people are slamming the phones and taking over the websites and making death threats over people expressing opinions.
Most of us will never ever have the opportunity to shop at Cut the Cake or Memories Pizza because we live nowhere near these businesses. Why would anyone think it's a good thing to make these people miserable? Why do you think this type of tactic will assist with your cause, whatever it might be?
We all need to learn how to disagree again. It is one thing to pass on stories about discrimination when they occur. It's another thing to just make everyone miserable and to grind their lives to a halt because you disagree with their opinions. This goes for both sides of these issues. It really needs to stop, because it's literally tearing this country to shreds.