Actually, Arlene’s has done business with this particular customer and other homosexuals for a long time and has employed homo workers. But she drew the line at a wedding ceremony. This customer wasn’t trying to get a reaction out of her — he went to the business because it was his florist.
I say this because many of the stereotypes of how this situation came about are not true. In fact, the customer didn’t make that huge of a deal of the refusal although he did write about it on his Facebook page. Others took the ball and made it into a test case.
Ahhh! Thanks for the info. I understand now, I’d probably do the same: a paying customer is a paying customer, but for a wedding? Yeah, I’d draw the line there, too.
Her best defense may be that the flowers were for a wedding ceremony where the operative word ‘wedding’ connotes a long established religious rite.
So she may have a 1st Amendment religion argument trump any equal rights arguments.
Surely if she refused based on race or national origin, she would lose as society will not tolerate this sort of discrimination.
She might be on losing ground if she refused homosexuals in general as a group designated by Washington State law as a protected class. But apparently she sold flowers to homosexuals but not for their ‘weddings’, hence she is on religious grounds.
Homosexuals do not need to trample on the long established religious usage of the words ‘marriage’ or ‘wedding’. They can use other words such as ‘union’ or ‘merger’. If a homosexual couple were to telephone her to order up flowers for their ‘merger ceremony’ or a ‘civil union reception’, I don’t think she would have refused. She is merely drawing a line in the sand to protect the meaning of the word ‘wedding’ as the joining of one man and one woman in religious matrimony.
There is no explicit law yet that says ***religious institutions*** must recognize and accept homosexuality. The law I believe requires the state to recognize homosexual marriage applications. A state recognized marriage contract can then be used to govern wills and estates, employer benefits and health insurance and so on. The state should use the phrase ‘social pairing application’ or ‘coupling application’ and not ‘marriage application’ for both heterosexual and homosexual couples. And the terms, definitions and statutes should be written to carefully emphasize the scope pertains to pairs or couples and not to triangles or polyamors and so on, else all meaning is lost.
Although I haven’t reviewed the Washington State law (RCW) statutes on ‘gay marriage’, I seem to recall it was confined to the STATE requirement that homosexual couples be eligible to receive FROM THE STATE a marriage certificate. I don’t believe it said anything with respect to ‘weddings’ so I wouldn’t expect the State AG to have a solid case against this lady.
So this is indeed a test case for homosexual marriage statutes regarding state offices issuing marriage certificates to extend out and attempt to govern external associations and assemblies regarding private social and religious rites and celebrations.
IMO the state should be barred altogether from using the word ‘marriage’ in any of its functions and instead use terms such as pair assemblage, pair bond, domestic pair, civil union and so on. The word ‘marriage’ has deep religious significance, is older than any state function involving marriage and should be hands off to any state official function.
Actually, Arlene’s has done business with this particular customer and other homosexuals for a long time and has employed homo workers. But she drew the line at a wedding ceremony. This customer wasn’t trying to get a reaction out of her — he went to the business because it was his florist.In a way this is kind of sad -- in a schadenfreude sort of way.
I say this because many of the stereotypes of how this situation came about are not true. In fact, the customer didn’t make that huge of a deal of the refusal although he did write about it on his Facebook page. Others took the ball and made it into a test case.