DETROIT – April Anderson bakes cakes. In a normal week she said Good Cakes and Bakes gets dozens of orders for custom bakes. In July, one order stopped her in her tracks.
“I just keep reading the messages constantly reading the message over and over,” Anderson said.
The order read “I am ordering this cake to celebrate and have pride in true Christian marriage. I’d like you to write on the cake, in icing, ‘homosexual acts are gravely evil.‘”
The order came from a man named David Gordon, a member of Church Militant -- a group in Michigan designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.
Anderson, who is openly gay, decided she would provide a cake, but the bakery doesn’t allow messages written on cakes ordered online.
“I was like because he put the word pride in there, I’ll make it a pride cake,” Anderson said.
And that’s exactly what she did -- a red velvet cake decorated in rainbows. On the inside of the box, “God is love, love is God.”
On pickup day, friends of the bakery came to offer support, but Gordon never showed. After five days, -- not wanting to give a customer an old cake -- Anderson was forced to throw it out. When Gordon called back, she told him he’d have to place a new order.
Gordon called it discrimination and threatened to sue.
“I felt so robbed. He didn’t come pick up the cake. I felt very disappointed leaving at six o’clock that he hadn’t come and picked up the cake,” Anderson said. “As I handed him the cake, I really wanted to look at his face.”
Since the order, Anderson has gotten thousands of orders from across the country showing an outpouring of support.
You can find out more information on Good Cakes and Bakes at its official website here.