Two conservative Christian wedding cake shop owners in Oregon started a crowdfunding campaign to fund their bigotry after getting fined for refusing to serve a lesbian couple, reported Addicting Info. What’s baffling is that they raised three times the amount of money needed.
Melissa and Aaron Klein own a wedding cake shop in Gresham, Oregon and were fined $135,000 for refusing service to a lesbian couple because it violated their religious beliefs. The idea of serving people whose lives they didn’t approve of upset them, and they closed down the shop. To pay the fine, the Kleins started a GoFundMe account and received $109,000 before the site closed the campaign. However, they found Continue to Give, “a faith-based giving platform” created for bigoted fundamentalists who get kicked off of other crowdfunding sites.
By July 14, the Kleins raised $352,500 from the campaign, an all-time record says Jesse Wellhoefer, the site’s founder. Despite complaints and requests to remove the Kleins’ campaign, Wellhoefer has refused. He hasn’t clearly said why, but the fact that his site receives a portion of the donations may be the reason. At 3.9 percent of the funds plus $0.60 per donation, Wellhoefer has gotten $18,000 from the Kleins’ campaign.
In the last year, there have been several similar incidents where hateful bigots make tons of cash from crowdfunding campaigns. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s an unfortunate thing that bigotry and hate is now so lucrative.
