Marjorie Silva Won't Bake A 'God Hates Fags' Cake

We’ve heard all the stories of florists who don’t want to sell flowers for two grooms getting married, and bakeries that won’t make cakes for same-sex-couples, but this is a new twist.

Marjorie Silva, owner of the Azucar Bakery in Denver will bake a cake for any occasion, for anyone, gay or straight or whatever. Until recently.

See, an older man came into her store one day and said he wanted a cake shaped to look like the Bible, and Silva said that was not a problem; she says she makes Christian-themed cakes "all the time” but this one was so different.

The man, when telling Silva what he wanted, took out a piece of paper with the words he wanted written on the cake, but he would not hand it over. One of the employees said he wanted them to write “God Hates fags” on the cake.

“He wouldn’t allow me to make a copy of the message, but it was really hateful. I remember the words detestable, disgrace, homosexuality, and sinners.”—Marjorie Silva

Still, Marjorie, to her credit, said she’d bake it, with a caveat ... she would not write those words on the cake but would “sell him a [decorating] bag with the right tip and the right icing so he could write those things himself.” She says she would have been devastated to release a cake with such a hateful message fashioned by her own hands.

And that’s when the man stood up, told her that she needed to talk to her attorney, and left.

Hmmm, I smell a set-up. And lo and behold, a few hours later, the man came back and asked if she’d conferred with her lawyer; she told him she was busy and didn’t have time, but once more offered to bake the Bible cake and sell him the tools to complete the task himself but that is clearly not what he wanted. She says, though no one raised their voice, the man was creating a scene and she asked him to leave, which he did.

Then he came back again — the third time in one day — and this time Marjorie asked her brother to excuse him, but before he left, he told Marjorie, and her staff, “You will hear from me!”

And she did, via a letter filed with Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies [DORA] that explained that a discrimination complaint had been filed against the bakery and that she would need to respond with her account of what happened that afternoon:

“I can … tell you that the customer wanted us to draw two males holding hands … with a big ‘X’ on them. I told him that we do not like to discriminate in this bakery, we accept all humans and that the message and drawing is extremely rude.”

Marjorie admits to being confused as to why the man chose her bakery, but said it might have had something to do with a pro-marriage-equality statement she gave to a Spanish-speaking news outlet after the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision; that’s the case where the Colorado Civil Rights Commission upheld a judge’s ruling that a Lakewood bakery was guilty of discrimination when the owners refused to bake cakes for gay weddings.

Marjorie suspects the man might have been organizing the backlash and using her shop to stage his protest, but she adds, in her response to DORA:

“I would like to make it clear that we never refused service. We only refused to write and draw what we felt was discriminatory against gays. In the same manner we would not … make a discriminatory cake against Christians, we will not make one that discriminates against gays.”

DORA will make a decision 30 days from receipt of Marjorie’s final statement, but let me make this perfectly queer: asking someone to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple is nothing like asking someone to bake a Bible cake with “God Hates Fags” on it.

One cake celebrates love, the other celebrates hate.

And possibly tastes terrible, too.

via NCRM and OutFront