The Gaystapo At Work

UPDATE 1 (BELOW) ON 04/27/15 AT 3:15 PM CT

UPDATE 2 (BELOW) ON 04/30/15 AT 5:45 PM CT

The story is told in the text of a widget that appeared in my sidebar for about 18 hours:

If — unlike the Gaystapo — you believe in property rights, freedom of expression, and freedom of association, please consider making donations to the following small-business owners:

Click here to donate to Aaron and Melissa Klein, who face a $135,000 fine for refusing to bake a cake.

Click here to donate to Barronelle Stutzman, a florist who has been prosecuted for refusing to sell flowers.

Click here to support the owners of Memories Pizza, who have been harassed and threatened for refusing to sell pizzas.

Because there will be more of the same, I have established a fund-raising effort to funnel money to future victims of politically correct persecutions: RestoreLibertyUSA. [UPDATE 04/27/15: Unsurprisingly, GoFundMe pulled the plug on my campaign, just as it pulled the plug on the Kleins’ campaign. The enemies of liberty are at work full-time. Their method is simple; if you disagree with them they call you a “hater” — end of discussion. They are the haters, of course; they hate everyone who disagrees with them, and they will go to any lengths to silence dissent from their views.]

The first link above leads to a donation page at SamaritansPurse.org. That page was established after GoFundMe, a crowdfunding operation, put a stop to the Kleins’ fundraising effort there. (See, for example, Valerie Richardson’s “Gay-Rights Advocates Torpedo GoFundMe Campaign for Christian-Owned Bakery,” The Washington Times, April 25, 2015.)

Upon reading about the Kleins and their treatment by GoFundMe, I decided on Sunday evening (April 26) to set up a fund-raising campaign at GoFundMe. I didn’t specifically mention the Kleins in my description of the campaign, but my intention to help them and other victims of the Gaystapo was clear. I then posted the sidebar widget. (In its original form, it didn’t include the second link in the paragraph about the Kleins and the final passage in brackets, both of which I added this morning before removing the widget.) Within a few hours after I had set up my campaign, GoFundMe sent me an e-mail message, which I didn’t see until this morning. It reads, in relevant part:

We are writing to inform you that your GoFundMe campaign has been removed due to a violation of our Terms & Conditions.

The content of your campaign falls under our “Not Allowed on GoFundMe” section. You may view this in our Terms & Conditions here – http://www.gofundme.com/terms

Unfortunately, our Terms & Conditions, along with strictly enforced policies from the payments industry, prohibit GoFundMe from allowing you to continue raising money for this campaign….

I replied:

I have reviewed your terms and conditions. I don’t see anything listed under “Not Allowed on GoFundMe” that pertains to my campaign. Please be specific.

I will update this post [again] if GoFundMe responds.

UPDATE 1: I was waiting for this shoe to drop: “After Bakers’ Fundraising Campaign Shut Down, Florist Who Rejected Same-Sex Wedding Faces Same Fate” (Kelsey Harkness, The Daily Signal, April 27, 2015).

UPDATE 2: GoFundMe didn’t respond directly to my reply, but did — belatedly — change its written policy to conform to its deletion of my campaign and others. Kelsey Harkness provides the details in “After Shutting Down Christian Bakers’ Fundraising Campaign, GoFundMe Makes Policy Change” (The Daily Signal, April 30, 2015). It’s GoFundMe’s right to refuse my business, of course. It’s too bad that GoFundMe and the Gaystapo don’t recognize that others have the same right — the unconstitutional “public accommodation” provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the contrary notwithstanding.

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Related reading:
Myron Magnet, “Free Speech in Peril,” City Journal, Spring 2015
Brendan O’Neill, “The Slow Death of Free Speech in Britain (America, You’re Next!),” Reason.com, April 26, 2015
Kelsey Harkness, “Should GoFundMe and Christian Bakers Be Treated the Same? We Ask,” The Daily Signal, April 28, 2015 [A good question, to which two obviously homosexual and fair-minded persons answered “they should be treated the same.”]

Related posts:
No Wonder Liberty Is Disappearing
How to Protect Property Rights and Freedom of Association and Expression
Democracy, Human Nature, and America’s Future
Good Riddance