lesbian couple spent a month on Instagram arranging catering for their planned January 2025 wedding.
Then, when the couple met with the restaurant owner in person, she sprung Lucy-with-the-football on them, and told them, “I’m really sorry we’re not going to be able to cater your wedding” (read story here).
The restaurant is in Centralia, Washington, a red-state town in a determinedly blue state. The owner told a Seattle TV station, “We love them. Jesus loves them. They are human just like us.”
Then she added, “The part of a wedding being a religious ceremony and religious act between a man and a woman goes against my beliefs and my faith and I cannot participate.” Well then, maybe she should tell people this on her website so gay couples don’t get sucked in, only to get sandbagged, you think?
Marriage is actually a legal relationship created by the state, and people get married because of how it affects property, inheritances, entitlement benefits, and so on. The fact many people add religious trappings to their marriage ceremony is incidental and doesn’t change that.
The woman told KING 5 News “she does not discriminate against anyone,” but it sure looks to me like she’s discriminating against this couple. The Cambridge Dictionary defines “discrimination” (here) as
“treating a person or particular group of people differently, especially in a worse way from the way in which you treat other people, because of their race, genera, sexuality, etc.”
And if you ask me, soft-pedaling discrimination by wrapping it up in Jesus makes it worse, and then denying you discriminated is lying, which is very un-Jesus-like. I’m not identifying the restaurant or woman, because she’s already getting hate messages, and that’s not what the couple or I want. The couple is going to sue, and this is for the law to resolve, not vigilante justice.
Liability could attach because the restaurant violated a Washington anti-discrimination law. It was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2013 case, but the court has changed and we’ll see if this becomes another precedent the Trump Court shunts aside to impose its questionable ideology on American law. In the religious arena, they’ve been ruling that religious bigots have a First Amendment-protected right to discriminate.
That’s a cockeyed interpretation of the First Amendment’s religious freedom clause. Nobody questions the right to be a bigot and discriminate in personal relations. But the government has power to regulate businesses, and some liberal-minded states have laws saying businesses open to the public can’t do that. That’s what the Washington law says.
If the Trump Court is going to change that, they should at least require businesses like this restaurant to display warnings on their websites and at their places of business that they won’t provide service for gay weddings. Why? Because it’s wrong to suck someone in, then snatch away the football, and lay them flat on their back. If I were on the jury, I would aware this couple damages against the restaurant owner. That has nothing to do with her religion; it’s for sucker-punching them.