So, A Black, Gay Pastor Walks Into A Whole Foods Market In Austin…
[guest post by Dana]
It just doesn’t get more socially aware than that, does it? Except. When Pastor Jordan Brown went to a Whole Foods Market in Austin to pick up a cake he had ordered with the words “Love Wins” inscribed on it, he claims he got far more than that. And as a result, he is planning on suing the market.
Brown released a video explaining what happened:
After Brown called the store to complain, he was told by an employee that the store would handle it “internally”.
However, after doing their due diligence and releasing a surveillance tape of Brown purchasing the cake, Whole Foods Market is now planning to take legal action against Brown for making a fraudulent accusation:
“Our bakery team member wrote ‘Love Wins’ at the top of the cake, which was visible to Mr. Brown through the clear portion of the packaging,” Whole Foods said in a statement. “That’s exactly how the cake was packaged and sold at the store. Whole Foods Market has a strict policy that prohibits team members from accepting or designing bakery orders that include language or images that are offensive.
Mr. Brown admits that he was in sole possession and control of the cake until he posted his video, which showed the UPC label on the bottom and side of the box,” the statement read. “After reviewing our security footage of Mr. Brown, it’s clear that the UPC label was in fact on top of the cake box, not on the side of the package.”
Ironically, according to reports, the bakery employee who inscribed the cake with “Love Wins” happens to be part of the LGBT community.
Church members and others have taken to the Church of the Open Door’s Facebook page to vent their anger at the pastor.
–Dana
Good grief.
Dana (0ee61a) — 4/20/2016 @ 6:34 amSo, someone misspelled “liar.”
Kevin M (25bbee) — 4/20/2016 @ 6:42 amAnother day, another black or gay fakes a grievance, another dog bites a man. S**t like this is why we’re dealing with Trump.
nk (dbc370) — 4/20/2016 @ 6:48 amAbout twenty of these back, the way to bet on hearing of a hate crime is “hoax”.
Richard Aubrey (472a6f) — 4/20/2016 @ 6:49 amAnd they’re usually not smart enough to figure out how to be out of sight of a surveillance camera (Albany).
Becoming the NORM, not the exception.
Rodney King's Spirit (db6706) — 4/20/2016 @ 7:10 amIt also appears the box is somewhat different – a plain brown top – not this green floral version. I bet he held on to a box from a previous cake or managed to obtain one and switched it when he had to reapply the label as a seal.
Janetoo (149f95) — 4/20/2016 @ 7:16 amResearchers often say there are genetic or biological connections behind homosexuality. If so, the fact so many in the GLBT community are of the left, including blatantly oddball and dishonest ones like the pastor, cannot possibly be merely a coincidence.
Mark (bc2df9) — 4/20/2016 @ 7:23 amThat’s been the case since at least 2000. Genuine hatred-motivated crimes do happen, but the more highly publicized an alleged instance of one is, the more I think one has to presume it false until proven true.
Speaking of which, does anyone know whether there were any genuine cases of anti-Moslem crimes in the aftermath of the 11-Sep-2001 attacks? Of the spate that were widely reported at the time my impression is that all turned out to have been something else, but that doesn’t preclude genuine ones that were’t widely publicized. I honestly don’t know and am looking for information, if anyone has it.
By the way, not being a genuine hate-motivated crime doesn’t necessarily mean it was a hoax. I think in most cases the crime is real enough, but the victims’ leap to the conclusion that it was motivated by hatred is unjustified and is eventually falsified when the criminal is caught and the real motive is discovered.
Milhouse (87c499) — 4/20/2016 @ 7:33 amAn employee at Whole Foods (in Austin of all places) perpetrating this “hate crime” is as likely as happyfeet saying something clever or original.
Jack Klompus (7682e6) — 4/20/2016 @ 7:36 amAain, bad statistics. Homosexuality almost certainly has some sort of biological basis. Idenfitication with the LGBTQRSTUV community does not. The community is not a representative sample of the total homosexual (or bisexual or whatever) population. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the statistics of one can’t be applied to the other.
Milhouse (87c499) — 4/20/2016 @ 7:36 amOne study of identical twins theorized that political/ideological biases may be no less innate or linked to genetic factors as any other major characteristic of a person. That becomes apparent when various humans as old as the current occupant of the White House are no less nonsensically leftwing today as they were in their youth, in spite of having lived through decades of facts and figures (and hard reality) that should have modified their politics. Not too coincidental, therefore, that the person America chose as its president in 2008 has been shadowed by rumors of homosexuality.
Mark (bc2df9) — 4/20/2016 @ 7:50 amI hope Whole Foods gets a good chunk of flesh in their lawsuit. This sounded like utter BS from the moment I heard it.
JD (34f761) — 4/20/2016 @ 8:21 amExpecting him to know the 10 commandments is racist, haters.
ras (d899fd) — 4/20/2016 @ 9:01 ami’d hit that cake
happyfeet (a037ad) — 4/20/2016 @ 9:03 amThese hoax incidents may be about money or “awareness” but really it seems like it’s almost sparked by mental illness, a need to be in the spotlight in an emotionally distraught state, like this man. I don’t know. It’s just weird.
Patricia (5fc097) — 4/20/2016 @ 9:18 amHe needs to feel special.
DRJ (15874d) — 4/20/2016 @ 9:20 amGAHHH.
As someone who knows people who *have* been badly treated because they are gay, this sort of thing infuriates me – the end result of fake claims of discrimination and ill-treatment will inevitably be that *real* claims of discrimination and ill-treatment are ignored out of suspicion that they’re fake.
aphrael (3f0569) — 4/20/2016 @ 9:29 amMilhouse,
MD in Philly (f9371b) — 4/20/2016 @ 9:35 amI am pretty sure there was at least one attack on a Sikh solely because the assailant thought the turban wearing man was Muslim, and for no other reason,
but I agree completely that documented attacks on Muslims are far less than attacks by Muslims that have been swept under the rug.
Yes, I remember that one but I don’t count it because it wasn’t in fact against a Moslem, although it was intended to be. I’m looking for verified instances of crimes committed, in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, by non-Moslems against Moslems, because they were Moslems.
People who are too ignorant to tell the difference between a Sikh and a Moslem (or a Dominican and a Klansman) are a different story. Really, people, it’s not rocket surgery.
Milhouse (87c499) — 4/20/2016 @ 9:56 amIf you have to make this stuff up, it’s a sign that you’ve won the war and are (at worst) only fighting small skirmishes.
Aside from that, nothing weakens the credibility of and sympathy for those who are actually discriminated against like hoaxes. Inexplicably, the Left always thinks that fake victims will drum up support for real victims, rather than getting people to wonder if real victims are just attention-seeking nutters.
bridget (37b281) — 4/20/2016 @ 10:03 amEven in the case of antisemitism, of which there’s enough around that there’s no need to invent any more, highly-publicized cases, especially ones involving little or no damage, are more likely to be fake than real.
Milhouse (87c499) — 4/20/2016 @ 10:10 amRemember 20 years ago, when the press tried to convince the public that there was some mysterious gang of white supremacists going around burning black churches? My first hint that this wasn’t so was when the NY Times reported that 37 black churches had burned, “along with more than a score of white churches”, and I was struck by the contrast between the very precise number and the very imprecise number, and wondered “How many more than a score? Could it possibly be seventeen more, or even eighteen? What are they hiding with this very strange locution?” And of course it turned out that my suspicion was correct, and while the fires were real enough the racial narrative was a hoax.
There was a sequel to this hoax: money was raised all over America to rebuild these burned black churches (but not the white ones), but this fund raising campaign turned out to be yet another hoax. The money went into the pocket of some so-called
Milhouse (87c499) — 4/20/2016 @ 10:23 am“bishop”, who ended up in prison over it. If you want to know why people make these hoaxes, follow the money.
I’d feel repulsion if I weren’t so inured to such behavior.
ThOR (a52560) — 4/20/2016 @ 10:54 amBut thanks for the post, Dana.
ThOR (a52560) — 4/20/2016 @ 10:54 amMost maddening about this incident is that it will be buried by the mainstream media stood ready to make a national victim/hero out of Pastor Brown if the facts were even a little murky. But now that he’s been exposed as a fraud, they’ll either pretend the whole thing never happened or mumble some schtuff about how the real incidents are just this shocking and worrisome, even though they won’t cite specifics.
BTW: For those who remember how little by little the facts came out about Matthew Shepard, you may have forgotten how the truth about Jesse Dirkhising did as well. Go to WorldNetDaily.com for the whole sad story about that kid, and his parents’ partial complicity.
L.N. Smithee (b84cf6) — 4/20/2016 @ 11:01 amSmithee. Shepard is a saint and Dirkhising is a “who?”. Crystal Mangum was a victim and Dukie rape victim-at a fraternity house, no less–Katie Rouse is also a nobody.
Richard Aubrey (472a6f) — 4/20/2016 @ 3:11 pmDepends on the lineup and the narrative.
Oh, yeah. Andrew Sullivan wrote a scorching piece about the difference in media coverage and the reaction of the gay community between the two cases.
Richard Aubrey (472a6f) — 4/20/2016 @ 3:16 pmI’d give the media half a pass. After all, you eventually run out of info on the murder case and begin writing about what people said about each. In Shepard’s case, the nation was convulsed, or at least the Right Sort of People were. So there was lots to journalism about. WRT Dirkhising, nobody gave a carp and so there wasn’t much to write about.
On television, as the two murderers were hauled off to prison after the trial, a morning TV personality asked a nearby person what she thought. “Give them skirts,” she said. “Small town meanness” said the personality who, it’s possible, did not know he’d been speaking to Dirkhising’s mother.
Congratulations if you actually saw some kind of contemporaneous coverage of the Dirkhising murder and the subsequent trial in a mainstream outlet, because I never did. Nobody wanted to, as they say, “go there,” especially with the implication that it could be characterized as the flip side to the ballyhooed Shepard tragedy. Despite subsequent facts implicating it is unlikely that he was killed simply because he was gay, Shepard’s brutal killing by a couple of bored, broke losers on a crime spree became the lever for a turnkey LGBT radical agenda spoon-fed to the public via Democrats in Congress and the MSM. All they needed was an excuse, even if they needed to fudge the facts to get where they wanted to go (this is a formula that also was effective when the fantasy of Lawrence v. Texas was brought to appeals courts).
I’d really be interested in seeing that video if you know where it could be found, because as I wrote earlier, Jesse’s mother — Tina Yates — is IMHO partially to blame for the death of her son. According to her mother/Jesse’s grandmother, she allowed and possibly encouraged him to associate with the men who eventually killed him with full knowledge they were hard-partying, drug-using gay lovers. Why? Yates, it is said, believed that Jesse himself was gay, and thought if gay is what Jesse wanted to be, there would be no problem if he hung out with gay men.
L.N. Smithee (b84cf6) — 4/20/2016 @ 3:58 pm“Love
HurtsWins”Love wins
Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 4/20/2016 @ 5:31 pmLove cakes
Love shuns gay flakes
Any fool not sharp or smart enough
To put the label right, put it back just so
Loves to play the fool, sharing tales of woe
Love wins,
Ooo-oo love wins
How would the baker have known he was gay? Did he make a pass?
I get all the other indicators that this was a fraud. I instantly questioned an Austin Whole Foods as not at all being likely for this type of behavior.
But in a taking a pre-made cake and requesting a bit of personalization on it, how did the purchaser’s orientation enter into it? Did the guy have a name tag on that said, “Hi! I’m Gay”?
Loren (66de82) — 4/21/2016 @ 8:31 amLoren,
Richard Aubrey (472a6f) — 4/21/2016 @ 9:22 amThe cake decorator is supposedly from the LGBTQ community. Maybe the rev recognized him/her and figured, hey, no biggie, throw this person under the bus. I need the money. Common interests and solidarity and simple morality don’t count when you’re a member of an Accredited Victim Group who needs money.
That’s why the gay community needs to take a lead in this sort of thing and “beat down” (in a figurative sense) the people within who perpetrate this crap. It’s so easy to suss out that it’s an act of bad faith, all it does is make life harder. I know I look at any claim like this with suspicion.
Bill H (dcdd7b) — 4/21/2016 @ 9:50 amWait a minute. They’ll refuse service to a customer based on whether they consider something offensive? As a matter of policy? Yet a Christian bakery can’t refuse to cater a gay wedding because they deem it offensive according to their ethic and religion? Couldn’t someone sue Whole Foods for this on the exact same grounds?
Jim S. (d465f1) — 4/21/2016 @ 10:57 amDon’t get your pants in a twist Jim. Whole Foods is a progressive company. Anything they think of as offensive comes with the Nod of Agreement from the correct people.
Bill H (dcdd7b) — 4/21/2016 @ 12:52 pmWhole Foods is going to have to get in line if they’re going to sue “Pastor” Brown.
http://twitchy.com/2016/04/20/this-takes-the-cake-pastor-who-faked-whole-foods-hate-crime-being-sued-over-college-loans/
I doubt that in addition to the hate cake hoax these facts will prevent the media from making “Pastor” Brown a gay rights icon. After all, the Tawana Brawley rape hoax didn’t hinder Rev. Sharpton’s reputation with the media. It should have, but
it clearly didn’t.
I’m not saying the Austin fraudster is going to build on his 15 minutes of
fame like the NYC fraudster did. He looks like he lacks the smarts. What I am
saying is, look around you! Since when is contempt for the law and the truth
a disqualifying character flaw for anything.
Hello. One word. Hillary!
Steve57 (066fdf) — 4/21/2016 @ 3:06 pmAnother similarity between “Pastor” Brown and “Reverend” Sharpton struck me shortly after this story broke.
Not both claim to be Christian ministers. Note the general prohibitions against lying throughout the Old and New Testaments and, even worse, the 9th Commandment, in which God commands believers not to bear false witness against their neighbors, weren’t even speedbumps as far as they were concerned. Brown filed a false and fraudulent civil case with a court hoping to defraud Whole Foods of significant cash. Sharpton tried to defraud a group of white men of their freedom simply out of racial hatred.
There are a lot of frauds masquerading as Christian authorities so I’m not implying these are the only two. But the fact is no Christian who actually believes in the fundamental doctrines of Chritianity; i.e. that Christ is God in the flesh, that He entered into creation to die on the cross to redeem sins, and on the third day He rose from the dead and then He ascended into heaven. You can’t believe in the authority of scripture and do these things. In fact, if you behave this way you can’t believe God exists and will hold you to account. Because if you did you wouldn’t be running around lightly breaking scriptural prohibitions let alone actual commandments.
What these people are practicing is a form of atheism. They don’t believe it themselves but they’ve noticed that like Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny there’s this cultural icon named Jesus that a bunch of gullible rubes believe in. So they plan on using Him as a prop to advance their political agenda.
An aside; when our “betters” try to convince us that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, it’s just that those manipulators in IS or AQ have hijacked a “great religion,” there’s no evidence that is at all true. That just reflects their anti-religious bias. They think religions in general are easily hijacked because only a bunch of low IQ knuckle-dragging “bitterly clinging” Neanderthals would believe in any of that nonsense to begin with. Which convinces them they can hijack Christianity any time they want; hence the religious left and their WWJD nonsense.
So just a heads up to the next hijacking attempt. “Openly gay Christian pastor” is true in the same sense as “Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea” is true. I.e. only two words in each title are true. Respectively that would be “openly gay” and “North Korea.” The other words are lies.
There is no honest argument you can make, an argument grounded in Christian theology, that homosexual activity is compatible with scripture or that the Bible somehow approves of same sex marriage. But this will not stop anyone from making dishonest, theologically unsound arguments notice the Austin fraudster presents himself as to his community and the world as a non-denominational pastor.
Steve57 (066fdf) — 4/21/2016 @ 4:19 pmI hate my computer ever since it developed a will of its own.
I’ll try to wrap things up as briefly as possible. The atheists are inside the gate, natch, and they’re posing as Christian authorities. Typically they fall into to two camps.
The first camp will rip what are sometime called the six “clobber” passages out of context and develop new and creative meanings for the original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek words used to condemn homosexuality as sinful.
Of course, this is deeply and obviously dishonest. The reason we need to transliterate the Bible from Hebrew, Greek, and to a lesser extent Aramaic is because they didn’t speak or write in English. Their native languages, or secondary contemporary languages in which they were fluent, were Hebrew, Aramaic, and/or Greek. They knew what they were saying. Every first century Jew, and the original disciples of Christ considered themselves Jews including Saul of Tarsus, understood the Torah (both the Hebrew and the Greek Septuagint) was condemning homosexuality in any form. So did second century Jews and Christians, and every cleric, rabbi, and scholar in all the rest of the centuries up until about 50 years ago when western political activists set out to invent new ways to twist the meaning of words.
It isn’t as if people who insist some women have
Steve57 (066fdf) — 4/21/2016 @ 4:33 pmyes, I think it shows deep disrespect to ignore the tenets of one’s own faith, or another, romans 1, which swanson recited from, reflects the eternal consequences of dissobedience, and they go on from there, but there is that passage from 2 Timothy, that reflects the age,
narciso (732bc0) — 4/21/2016 @ 4:38 pmI hate my computer ever since it developed a will of its own.
I’ll try to wrap things up as briefly as possible. The atheists are inside the gate, natch, and they’re posing as Christian authorities. Typically they fall into to two camps.
The first camp will rip what are sometime called the six “clobber” passages out of context and develop new and creative meanings for the original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek words used to condemn homosexuality as sinful.
Of course, this is deeply and obviously dishonest. The reason we need to transliterate the Bible from Hebrew, Greek, and to a lesser extent Aramaic is because they didn’t speak or write in English. Their native languages, or secondary contemporary languages in which they were fluent, were Hebrew, Aramaic, and/or Greek. They knew what they were saying. Every first century Jew, and the original disciples of Christ considered themselves Jews including Saul of Tarsus, understood the Torah (both the Hebrew and the Greek Septuagint) was condemning homosexuality in any form. So did second century Jews and Christians, and every cleric, rabbi, and scholar in all the rest of the centuries up until about 50 years ago when western political activists set out to invent new ways to twist the meaning of words.
It isn’t as if people who insist some women have penises and some men have vaginas and can even give birth are great respecters of objective reality or definitions.
Of course, we can track this. In some of the lexical sources the definition and explanation of the word “arsenokotai” is six times longer than it was in the 1980s. There’s no reason for that except politics. There hasn’t been any new manuscript evidence to support a rethinking redefinition of the word, which as I said everyone understood for centuries. Including, I might add, gay and lesbian scholars who had no political agenda. Most scholars are apolitical. They don’t necessarily study these ancient languages because they’re committed Christians trying to promote one agenda or atheists promoting the opposite agenda. They have no more emotional attachment to one particular outcome or another than mathematicians working on an equation. They just find the subject interesting.
The simple meaning is that arseno is Greek for male. You’ll see it in Genesis where “in the beginning He made them male (arseno) and female.” and kotai means bed. Arsenokotai means an exclusively male bed. And kotai, bed, has a sexual connotation. It’s the root of the English word coitus.
The word, which Paul may have coined if he didn’t get it from an earlier Jewish source no longer available to us, simply means generic sexual activity between two men. He simply combined two words used in the Greek version of the Septuagint to condemn homosexuality as sinful in Leviticus 18 and 20. Everybody knew this. Honest scholars, even those trying to revise the Christian approach to to homosexuality, admit this.
Which leads us to the second camp. These people will agree that the Bible says exactly what it appears to say. It is an exclusively heterosexual book. Every single time it refers to homosexuality it condemns it. There is simply nothing in the Bible that can be used to approve of same sex marriage.
But, they will argue, no one in the first century had any idea about “committed, loving” same sex relationships. And, they will posit, “the Holy Spirit is guiding us” to a new understanding of homosexual relationships, correcting the wrong ideas the first century Jews had about homosexuality, Including, necessarily Jesus.
Had I not heard the recording I wouldn’t have believed it myself. A pastor of my acquaintance attended and recorded from the audience (which was permitted) a debate on the subject of homosexuality and Christianity and the individual arguing the pro-gay side was a Dr. Kirk from one of Fuller Theological Seminary’s NorCal campuses.
Had this pastor not recorded the debate he wouldn’t have believed his own ears. He thought he must have nodded off or zoned out and missed something. So at one of the breaks he went up to the guy, introduced himself, made a little small talk, then got to the point and asked if he had heard the guy correctly. Had he said Jesus was wrong about homosexual relationships. Dr. Kirk said of course, that Jesus was just a man like you and me. The pastor was taken aback and asked if he was denying the divinity of Christ. Dr Kirk said “Oh, come on. You don’t really believe that.”
As you can see, or should see, this is theologically unsound. In fact it’s heretical to deny the divinity of Christ if you are going to consider yourself or present yourself as a Christian.
1 John:
Again, no professing Christian would make this argument. You have to deny the core Christian doctrines to even attempt it, thus destroying the foundation of Christianity and its entire justification to even exist. But it’s a particularly dangerous argument because it’s being promoted by what the LHMFM will believe are credentialed Christian theologians. They won’t know these people have no business calling themselves Christians. They fit the New Testament description of false prophets to a T and indeed the description of anti-Christs (which of course simply means “against Christ,” and there are lots of them; it doesn’t simply mean Satan). But they’ll be telling the LHMFM what they want to here, as will the post-Christian, non-Christian liberal protestant denominations who got past the whole “Jesus is the divine Son of God” thing years ago.
I suppose I should conclude this epic tome by observing homosexuality isn’t a special case that Christians can treat differently. If you don’t see yourself int those “vice lists” in the letters of Paul then you are a self-righteous hypocrite which is one of the worst sins you can commit.
It’s too simplistic to say, as the “gay Christian” movement insists, that the Old Testament laws don’t apply at all to Christians. It’s true that the ritual purity laws and the laws that distinguished the Israelites from their neighbors no longer apply. But there are universal prohibitions that do. For instance Leviticus 18 begins and ends with book-end paragraphs with God warning the Israelites not to behave like the Egyptians in the land they just left or the Canaanites in the land He is leading them into. In between is a laundry list of sexual sins. Are the “gay Christians” really saying that it’s OK for Christians to behave in ways that the pagans could not without angering God?
It isn’t as if Jesus thought so; read the Sermon on the Mount and it should scare the h3ll out of anybody who believes they are a Christian. He didn’t do away with any of the law; he expanded upon it. The laws says don’t commit murder. Jesus said if you are merely angry at a brother or sister you’ll be subject to the same judgement. The laws says to love your neighbor. Jesus said to love your enemy. The law says don’t commit adultery. Jesus said if you merely look at a woman lustfully you’re guilty.
It’s pretty simple. If you’re going to call yourself Christian then you submit to the authority of Christ. And that includes his exclusive authority to define sin for the people He created.
If you reject Christ’s authority, if you don’t believe in the Biblical definition of sin, that’s your business. But you hav e no basis and no right to call yourself a Christian.
This “Pastor” Brown can no more be an “openly gay Christian minister” than I could be an “openly polygamous Christian minister.” Jesus only affirmed one form of marriage in Mark 10 and Matthew 19; one man, one woman, “and the two shall become one flesh.” But the hijackers will call themselves Christians because that’s the only way they can pull off the heist. And I doubt most Christians are prepared for what’s coming.
Steve57 (066fdf) — 4/21/2016 @ 5:54 pm