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Bed and Breakfast owners forced to sell hotel after harassment by gay activists

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Gay rights vs religious liberty
Gay rights vs religious liberty

The Blaze reports.

Christian bed and breakfast owners who once famously refused service to a gay couple in the U.K. now claim that they’ve been forced to sell their hotel following a contentious legal battle andongoing harassment.

Hazelmary and Peter Bull insist that they have been the victims of vandalism, death threats and website attacks since the 2008 incident. As a result, in addition to the impending loss of the Chymorvah Hotel in Marazion, Cornwall, England, the couple has also grappled with intense anger from their ideological opponents.

Since denying a room to Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy, a gay couple, they have been forced to pay for legal representation and to compensate Hall and Preddy, all-the-while attracting fewer guests as a result of their stance on homosexuality (the hotel only allows married adults to share a bed).

“We were optimistic in the spring. Why wouldn’t we be with the summer ahead of us?,” Hazelmarytold the Daily Mail. “We have had a better summer than we thought but nowhere near good enough to pay our way. We were not even half-full. We must have been the only place in west Cornwall that had rooms left.”

[…]In an interview with the outlet, the Bulls said that they also had a dead rabbit nailed to their fence and that someone even removed the bolts from the tires on their car. They have also reportedly encountered death threats.

The Blaze also had an article about the Oregon couple who had to sell their bakery because of harassment by gay activists.

Excerpt:

But the harassment has also come in some very eerie forms, Melissa claims. In the early morning hours on Monday, the baker claims that someone broke into the Sweet Cakes truck, a vehicle the family uses to advance its business. The truck was parked in the Kleins’ driveway. This was particularly nerve-wrecking for Melissa and Aaron, astheir home, where the truck was located, is in a highly secluded area — one that is nowhere near where their former shop.

“Somebody came up into our driveway and rummaged through our truck and took stuff out,” she said. “The really strange thing is, they didn’t steal anything, they just made a mess. It kind of was a little creepy.”

The culprit didn’t take any money, she said, which was also odd, as the truck contained cash. While she’s definitely shaken by the incident, Melissa said that she feels safe, as her husband is a hunter who is trained to use a firearm. When he’s home, she’s fine, but when Aaron is out of the house, Melissa admitted that she does get a little scared.

In addition to losing their business, the Klein family has been impacted in other ways. Their children are now homeschooled — a decision that Melissa said she made this year following the media firestorm that erupted. And in light of the bakery’s closure, Aaron has gone back to work to help provide for the family.

The harassing e-mails haven’t stopped either. Melisa shared just a few of the messages she has received of late:

  • One message with the subject line “racist maggots” read, “People like you will burn in HELL, you racist pigs.“
  • Another read, “Your homophobic rants will not be forgotten and you will go out of business. This is the 21st century, a**holes.”
  • And another: “Do everyone a favor and fall off a cliff.”
  • One individual made it very personal: “Honey it would take a lot to make your ugly a** look good! You are ugly inside and out!”
  • And finally: “Maybe your god will send you some cat food to eat when you are living on the street?”

And those are just a few of the messages received over the past few days. Negative social media comments, too, have abounded.

This is what happens when cultural elites push the idea that their is only one side to the gay marriage debate. It probably doesn’t help that most Christians have not bothered to prepare a secular case against policies that we disagree with.  It’s very easy for the secular left to dehumanize their opponents when they think that our position is based on religion only. We have to find arguments that appeal to moral non-Christians in order to build a coalition that will defend basic human rights from gay activists.

News

Ann Furedi, CEO of UK’s largest abortion provider, endorses sex-selection abortion

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Ann Furedi

An article from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

The chief executive of Britain’s biggest abortion charity has said women are legally free to arrange an abortion because they are unhappy with the sex of their unborn baby.

Ann Furedi, of BPAS, said the law does not prevent women from choosing a termination on the grounds of gender and she even compared it to abortion after rape.

Mrs Furedi’s comments come weeks after it was disclosed that the CPS had decided not to prosecute two doctors who were exposed by a Daily Telegraph investigation arranging terminations purely because the unborn baby was a girl.

[…]Writing for online magazine Spiked, she said: “A doctor agreeing to an abortion on grounds of rape would be breaking the law no more and no less than a doctor who agrees an abortion on grounds of sex selection,” she said.

“While it is true that the sex of the foetus is not a legal ground for abortion, nor is rape, or incest, or being 13 years old. Nor is being homeless, or abandoned, or just feeling there’s no way you can bring a child into the world… yet they are all reasons why a doctor may believe a women has met the legal grounds of abortion.”

She added: “The woman gives her reasons, the doctor decides on the grounds as set out in the law … there is no legal requirement to deny a woman an abortion if she has a sex preference, providing that the legal grounds are still met.

“The law is silent on the matter of gender selection, just as it is silent on rape.”

The UK Guardian is probably the UK’s best-known left-of-center newspaper. They responded to the story.

Excerpt:

When you talk about being pro-choice, sex selective abortion is often slung at you as the triumphant gotcha. “You love women so much you want them to be in charge of what grows inside their bodies, but what about the women who are aborted, have a go at answering that? ZING!”

The answer is actually remarkably simple, and it’s this: it doesn’t matter whether what’s growing inside you is liable to end up as a man or a woman. What matters is whether the person it’s growing inside – the person who is going to have to deliver the resulting baby, at not inconsiderable personal peril – actually wants to be pregnant and give birth to this child. In a world where it’s possible to end a pregnancy safely and legally, it seems like rank brutality to force anyone to carry to term against her will.

And as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter why any woman wants to end her pregnancy. As the conscious and legally competent entity in the conception set-up, it’s the woman’s say that counts, and even the most terrible reason for having an abortion holds more sway than the best imaginable reason for compelling a woman to carry to term.

The article goes on to accuse pro-lifers of “misogyny” for opposing the murder of unborn girls, just because they are girls.

News

Obama administration effectively bans construction of future coal plants

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CNBC explains. (H/T Bad Blue)

Excerpt:

The proposal would help reshape where Americans get electricity, away from a coal-dependent past into a future fired by cleaner sources of energy. It’s also a key step in President Barack Obama’s global warming plans, because it would help end what he called “the limitless dumping of carbon pollution” from power plants.

Although the proposed rule won’t immediately affect plants already operating, it eventually would force the government to limit emissions from the existing power plant fleet, which accounts for a third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

[…]Despite some tweaks, the rule packs the same punch as one announced last year, which was widely criticized by industry and Republicans as effectively banning any new coal projects in the U.S.

That’s because to meet the standard, new coal-fired power plants would need to install expensive technology to capture carbon dioxide and bury it underground. No coal-fired power plant has done that yet, in large part because of the cost.

[…]”EPA has set a dangerous and far-reaching precedent for the broader economy by failing to base environmental standards on reliable technology,” said Hall Quinn, president and CEO of the National Mining Association. The EPA regulation “effectively bans coal from America’s power portfolio,” he said.

The first effect of this decision will be to put a lot of Americans out of work.

The second effect will be to cause electricity costs to skyrocket, exactly as Obama promised.

Excerpt:

Wind and solar energy are dilute, intermittent, and more costly than traditional hydrocarbon energy sources. After atmospheric absorption and system losses, only a single 100-watt bulb can be powered from a square meter of solar cells, and this only at midday on a cloudless day.  Wind towers must be spaced about 140 meters apart to capture energy from the wind.  As a result, solar requires 75 to 100 times the land and wind requires 150 to 250 times the land of traditional power sources.

Solar systems don’t output energy at night or at low angles of incoming sunlight.  Wind systems provide rated output less than 30% of the time and this output varies chaotically. Traditional gas or coal power plants must be running as an active backup to maintain continuity of electricity supply.  Like a car driving in stop-and-go conditions, installation of a wind farm converts the power system into a stop-and-go electrical system.  In measured real world conditions, combined wind and hydrocarbon systems use more fuel, output more sulfur and nitrogen oxides, and emit more carbon dioxide than hydrocarbon-only electrical systems.

Total cost estimates show that wind and solar systems are significantly more costly than hydrocarbon energy sources.  Since wind requires an active backup hydrocarbon facility, wind can only replace some of the variable cost of a coal or gas plant.  Department of Energy 2011 estimates place the variable cost of coal at 3 cents per kW-hr and gas at 5 cents per kW-hr, compared to 9 cents for on-shore wind and 24 cents for offshore wind.  Solar costs are 20 to 30 cents per kW-hr.

We’re getting what we voted for. We’ve had no significant global warming for 15 years, but that won’t stop the Democrats from saddling private industry with regulatory costs – costs that they will pass on to consumers. I would not be surprised if consumers (who after all mostly voted for Obama) blame the energy companies and never identify the root cause of the rising costs.