The rest of the religious liberty story

The rest of the religious liberty story July 29, 2016

The Christian Science Monitor is running a seven-part series on religious liberty.  According to Julia Duin, it is remarkably fair and balanced, including fuller accounts of the florists and bakers who are losing everything they own because they will not participate in gay weddings.

For example, we learn that the florist in Washington state had done lots of business with the man who would later file a discrimination claim against her.  She sold him $4,500 worth of floral arrangements over nine years.  She didn’t discriminate against him in her business because he was gay.  She knew that he was and considered him a friend.  But when he asked her to create floral designs for his wedding to another man, as a Southern Baptist, she had to draw the line.  But even then the jilted customer didn’t want to ruin her until he was talked into it by the ACLU, who added onto the discrimination complaint a lawsuit that would also seize all of her personal assets.

From Warren Richey, A florist caught between faith and financial ruin – CSMonitor.com:

Barronelle Stutzman loved doing custom floral work for Robert Ingersoll. He became one of her best customers, often encouraging her creativity.

“Do your thing,” he would tell her when placing an order. And he loved what she did.

Over the years, Mr. Ingersoll spent nearly $4,500 on flowers and arrangements by the florist in Richland, Wash.

Through a thriving nine-year business relationship, the fact that Mr. Ingersoll is gay had never been relevant.

But it was now.

As a devout Southern Baptist, Stutzman’s involvement in a same-sex wedding would violate her religious beliefs about the sanctity of marriage as a divinely blessed union exclusively between one man and one woman.

She did not object to selling flowers or floral arrangements from her shop to Ingersoll, as she’d done many times before. What she objected to was the possibility of a job requiring her personal involvement in the celebration of a same-sex marriage. That would be a denunciation of her faith.

So when Ingersoll arrived in her shop, excited to share his happy news, Stutzman was torn.

“Rob was asking me to choose between my affection for him and my commitment to Christ,” she would later write in a Seattle Times essay. “As deeply fond as I am of Rob, my relationship with Jesus is everything to me.”

That five-minute conversation with Ingersoll, she added, was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.”

Now, three years after the brief meeting in her flower shop, the 71-year-old florist is facing the prospect of financial ruin.

Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Washington have filed discrimination lawsuits.

In addition to targeting her business, Arlene’s Flowers, Inc., they sued Stutzman personally, ensuring that any assets she might own beyond the flower shop could be taken from her to pay their own legal fees if she lost.

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