“DESTROY THE EVIL CAKE DISCRIMINATORS!!!!”

If GoFundMe isn’t going to have the integrity to avoid taking sides in complex political and cultural disputes, it is functionally useless.

Perhaps it should change its title to “GoFundMyPoliticallyCorrectCause.”

Pusillanimous GoFundMe caved in to pressure from vindictive gay marriage activists and pulled the crowdfunding campaign on the site that had raised more than $109,000 for the Christian-owned bakery,  Sweet Cakes by Melissa.

The cake shop in Gresham, Oregon, became ground zero for the same-sex marriage debate  in January 2013, when it turned away customers who wanted cakes for a same-sex wedding. The spurned couple filed a complaint to the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, claiming their civil rights under the Oregon Equality Act had been infringed. In defense, the owners of the business stated that they  refused to cater  the wedding because of their religious beliefs, and thus their decision was protected by the U.S. Constitution. They subsequently closed the shop, and carried out their business from home. The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries proposed a damages award Friday of $135,000 against Aaron and Melissa Klein, the owners, for being in violation of the state’s anti-discrimination law. The award, which is not final, would provide $60,000 in damages to Laurel Bowman-Cryer and $75,000 in damages to Rachel Bowman-Cryer for “emotional suffering stemming directly from unlawful discrimination.”

“The campaign entitled ‘Sweet Cakes by Melissa‘ involves formal charges. As such, our team has determined that it was in violation of GoFundMe’s Terms & Conditions,” said GoFundMe in an email statement.

In a word, pathetic. Refusing to sell a cake is not, by any stretch of the imagination, even to the most hypersensitive, delicate snowflake gay marriage advocate, the equivalent of a “violent, hateful, or sexual act,” especially in this case, where the service being withheld is right on the line between a public commodity and a First Amendment protected expressive act. Refusing to sell a cake to a gay couple is an unethical, misguided, mean and jerkish thing to do, a violation of the Golden Rule and a blight on organized religion, but it cannot be reasonable called “heinous.”Heinous means “utterly odious or wicked,” and synonyms are evil, atrocious, monstrous, abominable, horrific, terrible, awful, abhorrent, loathsome, hideous, unspeakable, and execrable.

Oh, come on.  It’s a cake. Yes, being told you have to go to a different bakery is insulting, it is annoying, it is inconvenient. and it is wrong. Obviously it will sustain a complaint to a government agency. But a good faith belief that it is within a citizen’s rights to refuse to sell a cake related to a ceremony one objects to,  especially before the issue has been conclusively settled, cannot reasonably be treated as  a “heinous crime.”

The gay marriage advocates are (again) behaving like vindictive bullies by trying to stop sympathetic Americans from assisting small business owners, two of many, who have found their enterprise destroyed because they stumbled into  the maw of a violent cultural shift they were not prepared to deal with. GoFundMe, by capitulating to an effort to block compassionate contributions to a legitimate, if politically incorrect, beneficiary has breached its mission and revealed itself as unsuited for its own business niche.

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Facts: Washington Times