"Full House" actress Candace Cameron Bure has come to the defence of Melissa and Aaron Klein, the defamed Christian couple in Oregon and the owners of Sweet Cakes bakery, who refused to provide a wedding cake to a lesbian couple who ordered for such a cake.
Because of the Kleins' refusal to bake such a cake based on their religious beliefs, the lesbian couple Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer sued them. The judge sided with the lesbian pair and ordered the Kleins to pay $135,000 to the plaintiff to compensate for such claimed damages as acute loss of confidence, high blood pressure, impaired digestion, loss of appetite, migraine headaches, resumption of smoking habit, and weight gain, among many others.
Speaking to her co-host Raven Symone on the ABC talk show The View, Bure said that racial discrimination is far different from sexual discrimination.
"I don't think this is discrimination at all. This is about freedom of association," Bure said. "It's about constitutional rights. It's about First Amendment rights. We do still have the right to still choose who we associate with."
The bakery did not refuse to bake the cake because of the couple's sexual orientation, explained Bure, since they have actually baked cakes for them previously.
"They had a problem with the actual ceremony because that—the ceremony—is what conflicted with their religious beliefs. They are saying that they stand for marriage between a man and a woman," she reasoned.
Symone, who earlier admitted being a lesbian, became very upset with Bure's comments and even told her: "I refuse to associate with you right now."
"Sexual orientation goes hand in hand with marriage in that situation," Symone said. "If it was a man and a woman, and one was black and one was white, and they discriminated against them, we could also go back into the Constitution that's had many amendments saying that they should take care of this family as well."
