Jeb Bush: Florists Must Sell Flowers To Gay Couples, Unless They’re Wedding Flowers

Jeb Bush is wading into the wedding flowers and cakes wars, trying to appease all, and failing.

Back in April, during the middle of Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s self-created implosion over a discriminatory “religious freedom” law designed to marginalize LGBT people, Jeb Bush headed to California to try to woo high-value Silicon Valley donors. It didn’t end well, after Bush offered support for Pence’s anti-gay discrimination.

Salon’s Joan Walsh had written it was “all such bad timing – as he headed to Silicon Valley to raise megabucks for his Right to Rise PAC. Bay Area businesses like Twitter, Yelp and Salesforce, plus valley titan Apple, had all blasted the law.”

Campaigning in San Francisco on Thursday, Jeb Bush’s timing also could not have been worse.

The Republican presidential candidate, second now to Donald Trump, made a big media deal of stepping into an Uber car Thursday morning, which turned out to be the same day a judge ruled Uber should be forced to pay the State of California $7.3 million for its failure to follow state regulations.

Riding “shotgun,” Bush pulled up to a San Francisco startup, Thumbtack, where he shared his views on the third rail of politics – not “entitlements,” although he spoke to those too – but whether or not a Christian florist should have to sell flowers to a same-sex couple for their wedding, along with other wage discrimination and LGBT civil rights issues.

TIME reports that a Thumbtack employee “who identified himself to Bush as being gay asked about Bush’s position on legislation to ban discrimination of LGBT Americans. ‘I don’t think you should be discriminated because of your sexual orientation. Period. Over and out,’ he replied.”

“The fact that there wasn’t a law doesn’t necessarily mean you would have been discriminated against,” Bush told the gay employee. Small comfort to the millions of LGBT Americans who have been discriminated against, no doubt, and ignoring the fact that in more than half the states across the nation, LGBT employees have had access to no legal protections and have been fired just for being LGBT.

Bush “added that in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, the country must work to carefully balance the rights of those seeking to marry and the religious beliefs of those who oppose those unions.”

Citing the frequently-used example by religious freedom advocates, Bush said that in the case of a florist approached by a gay couple, “you should be obligated to sell them flowers, doing otherwise would be discriminatory.” But he said that the objecting florist should not be required to participate in the wedding, a fine line that he hopes will appeal to all sides of the debate.

In other words, a florist, Bush believes, cannot discriminate against gay people for being gay, but they can if the very same gay people are getting married. 

CBS News quoted Bush’s comment a bit more fully:

“If you’re a florist and you have that deeply felt belief, you should if a gay couple comes in and says I want to buy flowers you should be obligated to sell them flowers. Doing otherwise would be discrimination. But if that couple asks you to participate in the wedding, and you said, based on my conscience I shouldn’t or I won’t, you should not be fined, you should not have to close your business down.”

The religious right over the past year or more has been using the phrase “participate in” to include even the act of, say, merely arranging flowers or baking a cake for the wedding of a same-sex couple.

And Bush’s words are wholly consistent with what he told Pat Robertson’s CBN News in May, telling reporter David Brody that he supports the concept that wedding-related vendors – bakers, florists, photographers – should be given the legal right to discriminate against same-sex couples getting married, based on their professed religious or moral beliefs.

Brody asked the former Florida governor if he is “OK” if wedding vendors don’t provide their services to same-sex couples.

“Yes, absolutely if it’s based on a religious belief,” Bush had responded.

TIME goes on to note that when the gay employee “followed up to ask specifically whether he would support anti-discrimination laws for LGBT Americans for their housing and employment—the next target for gay rights marriage advocates—Bush said he would at the state level.”

“I think this should be done state-by-state, I totally agree with that,” Bush said.

Again, timing is everything.

Later in the day yesterday, the EEOC released an historic and groundbreaking ruling, stating that gay, lesbian, and bisexual employees are covered by and included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it comes to employment discrimination. In other words, at the federal level, nationally, not “state-by-state,” as Bush prefers.

Bush also agreed that wages should be equal between men and women, but insisted “there are laws to make it so, and they should be enforced,” not added to.

As for “entitlements,” what many Americans call government programs like Social Security and Medicare, CNN’s Ashley Killough tweeted what Bush had to say:

So how did Bush fare at the six-year old San Francisco startup?

International Business Times reports that the “gay employee” who asked Bush about discrimination is Jake Poses, Thumbtack’s vice president of product. 

“I appreciate him saying I shouldn’t be discriminated against, but I do believe that if he had more conviction about it, he should [handle it at the federal level],” Poses told IBTimes.

“I give him credit for understanding that startups in San Francisco are having a real and measurable impact on the lives of many Americans,” Poses said. “I probably will not vote for him, but that is because I put a premium on views on social issues. I think that actually is the pervailing view of most people in the Silicon Valley community. That’s part of the ethos of what’s out here.” 

Not the first time Bush has failed when visiting Silicon Valley. 

All in all, not a great day, some might think.

 

Front page image by Jon Lieber via Twitter
Top image by Ashley Killough via Twitter