There’s been an update on the persecution of the Christian bakers from Oregon. They appealed their case to the Oregon Court of Appeals.
The Daily Signal has the latest news:
A husband-and-wife baking team must pay a $135,000 fine for declining to make a cake for the wedding of two women, Oregon’s second-highest court has ruled.
A three-judge panel of the Oregon Court of Appeals on Thursday upheld a decision by a state agency that led to the fine and forced Aaron and Melissa Klein to close their bakery.
The court ruled that baking wedding cakes is not “speech, art, or other expression” protected by the First Amendment. The judges said the state did not “impermissibly burden the Kleins’ right to the free exercise of religion” because it compelled the Christian bakers only to comply with “a neutral law of general applicability.”
Oregon law prohibits businesses from refusing service because of a customer’s sexual orientation, as well as because of race, gender, and other personal characteristics.
“We are very disappointed in the court’s decision,” Michael Berry, deputy general counsel at First Liberty Institute, which represents the Kleins, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Friday. “I think that punishing people for their religious beliefs is … not American, and it’s wrong.”
“It does not matter how you were born or who you love,” one of the lesbians, Laurel Bowman-Cryer, said in a written statement following the ruling.
[…]After the Kleins declined in 2013 to make a cake for the wedding of Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer, citing their Christian religious beliefs that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, they also faced protests that eventually led them to shut down their bakery.
[…]Berry, the First Liberty attorney, said his legal team is deciding how they will move forward, which could mean appealing to the Oregon Supreme Court.
How would same-sex marriage affect your marriage? That’s what proponents of same-sex marriage asked before forcing us all to participate in their gay weddings. The Christian bakers in question did not discriminate against individual gay people, they just didn’t want to be participants in a view of marriage that is unacceptable to any Bible-believing Christian. Marriage is important in Christianity. It’s a union of complementary male and female natures designed to provide children with male and female parenting.
If you’re living in one of the blue or purple states in the map above, then you are vulnerable to persecution by your state. It’s very important for Christians to be aware of where they live, and to whom they are paying taxes. I think husbands in particular need to be careful about what they study, where they work, and where they live, given the challenges that Christian families face from the secular state. Secular leftists are in love with their sinful rebellion, and morality makes no sense to them. We have seen many, many examples of people on the secular left using threats, coercion, vandalism and even violence, to get others to agree with them.
It’s worth remembering that we’re in this situation largely because pious Bible-oriented pastors have been taking a vacation from the moral issues of the day, e.g. – abortion and same-sex marriage. They see their role as feeling good and being liked. Using science and philosophy to train Christians about the case for pro-life and or the case for natural marriage is too much work. I guess they think that it’s better to just focus on proper theology for the 50th time in a row, and not say anything divisive about current events.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I recommend they not pay the fine. A hard task for sure, but it can be done via appeals to higher courts.
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It’s very hard for a husband and wife with children to go to jail if they don’t pay the fine, and appealing to the Oregon Supreme Court costs money. The risk was taken in thinking that they could start a business in a blue state and survive. People on the secular left are not “normal people”. The foundation for morality is gone, and that means nothing is right or wrong any more. When people descend into sin, and it makes the worst kinds of evil to your fellow man seem reasonable. My feelings are hurt = I’ll take all of your livelihood and savings, so that you and your wife and your children starve to death.
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What I find amusing is that in a situation like this in the future. Christians can smile and take their money to act compliant.
As long as they don’t tell anyone else they can still
Forget to make it
Burn it.
Do a bad design
Deliver it late
Accidentally drop it.
With all of those they can merely have to give a refund and get on mad customer.
Sadly because Christians are honest people they are unlikely to do this, and instead be persecuted because they hold morals and would not do anything I stated that in reverse those suing the bakers would likely not feel bad on doing of roles were reversed
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Isn’t it funny that the LGBT activists don’t go after Muslim bakers? I think it’s because the state would not prosecute Muslims who decline to participate in a same-sex wedding.
I’m not saying that the Christians in question did not act faithfully and honorably. Perhaps they overestimated how much aid they could expect from the multitude of people who attend church in this country. But in the end, we are living in a secular society. We have to be informed about how fascism is conducted by the sex-addicts on the secular left in other countries. And we need to guard ourselves from their attacks, while simultaneously countering their activism with our own writings, donations, parenting, training, etc.
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It is a true point they would not go after a Muslim baker.
We do need to remember that we are on a downward slide to communism. I had someone tell me that they had coffee with a man that had moved here not long ago from Russia and the Russian pointed out all the little moves into our rights and checking up on your neighbour were small gradual moves that they had occur over time.
We need to use godly wisdom to recognize that there are evil wicked forces in high places.
I tend to avoid using terms like that because people tend to take it like it is some demon to cast out around the corner.
But if you look at it from a cs Lewis screw tape letter perspective. We should see that it is not nice people trying to help others. Rather those with minds closed to God trying to enslave and force others to live in their wicked lifestyle.
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