Let them make cakes

By now the story of Aaron and Melissa Klein losing their bakery is well-known: Sweet Cakes by Melissa in Gresham, Ore., would not make a cake for Rachel Cryer’s and Laurel Bowman’s same-sex wedding. The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industry (BOLI) ordered the Kleins to pay Cryer and Bowman $135,000, and their appeal of BOLI’s decision is in process in the courts.

What isn’t well-known is how much higher the actual cost has been to the Kleins.

Before Cryer and Bowman forced the issue, the Kleins ran their bakery under the low-hanging roof of a building on NE Division Street. They had so much business they had to turn customers away.

The shop stood between an antique store and Casa la Polla, a Peruvian restaurant. Amarilis Cabrera, the restaurant owners’ daughter, made friends with the two middle Klein boys. She remembers they attended church every Sunday and asked her not to swear. “They were my first friends in Oregon,” Cabrera said. “They were there when you needed them.”

After school the Klein children used to help their parents close up the bakery. They cleaned, made jokes, and sometimes had frosting fights. The Kleins had hoped to pass Sweet Cakes down to their children.

Then the story of the Kleins’ refusal to bake a same-sex wedding cake hit the news in February of 2013. Supporters drove from distances to offer their business. But by August 2013 media dropped the story and supporters disappeared.

Homosexual activists did not: That summer they harassed businesses that referred customers to Sweet Cakes. The Kleins had friends tell them they couldn’t pick up the phone for weeks without being cursed or insulted. One by one the businesses stopped sending customers their way.

Bowman filed her BOLI discrimination complaint in August 2013, claiming Klein had broken the 2007 Oregon anti-discrimination law: Businesses cannot forbid equal access to goods and services on the basis of sexual orientation.

“I cannot believe the amount of lies that was in this,” Klein said of the complaint. It included the women’s assertion they were both in the shop and Klein said their money was useless.

Meanwhile the Kleins were losing most of their business. By January 2014, when BOLI announced they would try the case, Sweet Cakes was close to negative revenue.

“I saw Melissa cry a couple times,” said Claudia Cabrera, Amarilis’ mother.

Klein began to look for another job. Before opening Sweet Cakes, he had driven a garbage truck. When he called to check for an opening, the man said no. Then, 20 minutes later, he called back. An employee just left. “Can you start on Monday?” he asked.

They left the shop at 44 NE Division St. on Sept. 1, 2014, and Klein began a job with about half the income of Sweet Cakes. One day Klein came home from work and Melissa met him, upset. A bill had come in she didn’t think they had money to pay.

They prayed, and 10 minutes later they found a check in their mailbox that covered the bill. “I’ve never felt my faith stronger than when I was going through this,” Aaron Klein said.

But death threats came in the mail too, or on the phone, or into their email inbox. “You must die for your sins and your shop will be blown up,” a man named Stanimir Dimitrov emailed Klein. “I know where you live … don’t fall asleep.”

The Kleins’ case went before BOLI in March 2015. The Kleins sat silently for almost three days in a meeting room of a BOLI office building listening while Cryer and Bowman claimed Aaron Klein caused them mental, emotional, and physical damage in order to force himself into the media spotlight.

When Klein told his story, the judge seemed distracted, attorney Anna Harmon said. Bowman and Cryer were sobbing “uncontrollably.”

The hearing ended, and Brad Avakian, BOLI commissioner, saying the Kleins needed to be “rehabilitated,” approved the decision. They had to pay, from personal and business assets, $135,000 to Bowman and Cryer.

“We conducted a thorough investigation,” BOLI spokesperson Charlie Burr said. “The Kleins are free to appeal.”

Harmon said the Kleins didn’t break the law, calling the case a “situation where the government is out of control.” Klein is open to taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

“I could walk away from this now,” he said. “But that leaves the door open for it to happen to someone else. … You could find yourself in my situation very easily.”