Apparently, if you are Christian, you aren’t allowed to fundraise on GoFundMe. Last week, GoFundMe banned Sweet Cakes by Melissa (who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding) and Arlene’s Flowers (who refused to decorate for a gay wedding.) After Memories Pizza raised over $850,000 on GoFundMe over people fed up with discrimination against Christians, both Arlene’s Flowers and Sweet Cakes by Melissa had pages created for them. Both of these individuals had judgements filed against them that could cost them their homes, business, and basically their lives. So GoFundMe pages were set up to help out these two.
Arlene’s Flowers which had been aprroaching $200,000 raised has been suddenly pulled, just a week after Sweet Cakes by Melissa was banned by GoFundMe. Score another victory for the gaystapo..
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| GoFundMe bans Christian fundraising pages including Arlene’s Flowers |
The new policy is phrased neutrally, as a ban on donations for anyone formally accused of “discriminatory acts,” but it’s obvious who the target is. Last week they shut down fundraising pages for Sweet Cakes by Melissa and Arlene’s Flowers, two Christian-owned businesses facing discrimination charges for declining to provide services to same-sex weddings, and caught hell for it from conservatives online. With good reason. Until this week, GoFundMe banned fundraising “in defense of formal charges of heinous crimes, including violent, hateful, or sexual acts,” but Sweet Cakes and Arlene’s Flowers weren’t accused of crimes. They were accused of violating civil antidiscrimination statutes. Even if they had been accused of crimes, only a truly lunatic supporter of gay marriage would treat politely refusing to bake a wedding cake as on par with the sort of crimes people typically think of as “heinous.”
So GoFundMe had a dilemma. It could either violate its own policy by keeping Sweet Cakes and Arlene’s Flowers off the site despite the fact that no crime had been committed, or it could reinstate the fundraising pages for those businesses and piss off fanatic, boycott-ready gay-rights activists. In the end, they made the smart business decision by finding a third way. They’d change their policy in the name of keeping those pages offline, knowing that it’s safer for a company to cross social conservatives than to cross the left and their media allies on gay issues.