Bakery Battles: Colorado Cake Shop Refuses to Make Anti-LGBT Cake

Out of the courtroom and into the ... bakery?

The fight for marriage equality, so often fought in the legal system or at the ballot box, has picked up a curious side battle: the quest for equality at the bakery.

The latest battleground: a Colorado bakery whose staff wouldn't write "God hates homosexuality" and other anti-LGBT text and imagery on a cake. The prospective customer retaliated by filing a discrimination complaint, reports Out Front Colorado.

"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," Marjorie Silva, owner of Azucar Bakery in Denver, said in a statement submitted to the state's Department of Regulatory Agencies in connection with the complaint. (The bakery reportedly offered to sell the cake without the anti-LGBT decoration and to sell the customer the supplies to add the text himself.)

The Colorado clash follows last year's efforts by anti-LGBT activist Theodore Shoebat attempting to paint bakeries as hypocritical for refusing to put the words "gay marriage is wrong" on a cake.

Shoebat -- and presumably the unnamed Colorado man -- seek to create a false equivalency between bakeries that have come under legal fire for refusing to make cakes for same-sex weddings with those that won't produce blatantly anti-LGBT messaging. Of course, refusing to create a cake for an opposite-sex couple's wedding would be analogous discrimination, and it's doubtful that many bakeries would be eager to make "straight marriage is wrong" or "God hates heterosexuality" pastries.