West Coast, Messed Coast™ – Where Do We Get Our Reputation Back? – Edition

Welcome to the West Coast, Messed Coast™ report this week, where we answer the puzzle about how all who wander are not lost, they’re just searching for a U-Haul to get the hell out of California. More on that in a moment.

In Oregon, Aaron and Melissa Klein have been looking to get their good names back for nearly a decade. Their Sweetcakes by Melissa shop was ruined by the Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) in 2013 before the state-approved gay marriage. The Kleins were smeared by the media and the Left — the same thing — for refusing to design and bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple in the days before gay marriage.

BOLI, then run by political hack Brad Avakian, reflexively went to guns and began to pew! pew! pew! at the Christian couple. BOLI fined the Kleins $135,000 claiming their religious rights did not outweigh anti-discrimination rules. Avakian put the Kleins under a gag order and was so unfair and overtly anti-Christian — announcing that Christians needed to be “rehabilitated” in their beliefs — that he lost his next election to a Republican in Oregon.

The Oregon Court of Appeals now rules that the state agency was unfair and biased in fining the Kleins. The court also noted in the ruling that the mother of one of the women lied about the conversation between her and Aaron Klein which set off the conflagration over the cake in the first place. The mom came back to lecture Aaron Klein about how she’d overcome her religious adversity to gay marriage. They swapped scriptures and had a good talk. Mom went back to the couple and claimed that Klein had called her daughter an “abomination.” The court canceled the fines but remanded the case to BOLI to reassess it.

Stephanie Taub of First Liberty Counsel said the ruling makes no sense, saying “the court admits the state agency that acted as both prosecutor and judge, in this case, was biased against the Kleins’ faith.” She continued, “yet, despite this anti-Christian bias that infected the whole case, the court is sending the case back to the very same agency for a do-over. Today’s opinion should have been the end of this 10-year-long saga.” She concluded that “it’s time for the state of Oregon’s hostility toward Aaron and Melissa to end.”

Emotions and lying underpinned this persecution. Where do the Kleins go to get their reputation back? Will they once again ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene if BOLI throws the book at them again?

Speaking of the limits to free speech, the broadcast gods have identified the third rail of college basketball play-by-play, not that you thought to ask.

The University of Montana women’s basketball play-by-play guy noted during the team’s game against Portland State University that PSU players weren’t getting called for committing copious fouls.

Announcer Mark Martello thought that sounded familiar and said the PSU players were “like Antifa after a riot. They might go to jail, but they get out right away. They can get away with it.”

That Antifa observation is objectively true.

He also noted that Portland has taken a violent turn where it’s like the South Side of Chicago.

Also true.

But Learfield Sports thought their woke audience would be offended and fired him.

At Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., John Stockton burnished his living legend credentials even more when the University was “forced,” as the media put it, to cancel his season tickets. The Gonzaga and NBA legend’s tickets were suspended because he refuses to wear a mask.

“Basically, it came down to, they were asking me to wear a mask to the games and being a public figure, someone a little bit more visible, I stuck out in the crowd a little bit,” Stockton told a Spokesman-Review reporter. “I’ve been part of this campus since I was probably 5 or 6 years old. I was just born a couple blocks away and sneaking into the gym and selling programs to get into games since I was a small boy. So, [his relationship with the school is] strained but not broken, and I’m sure we’ll get through it, but it’s not without some conflict.”

Speaking of flaming out, the narrative about this being a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” continues to self-immolate at a blistering pace.

KPTV reports that Multnomah County (Portland) health officials confirm that two-thirds of the new COVID-19 cases are in — oops — vaccinated people.

Science.

In the A + B = C department, California learned that when you stress the taxpayers by promising free health care for illegal aliens, hot and cold running drugged-out bums on every corner, great train robberies, and locking people down, they will hightail it out of town faster than you can say U-Haul. Sadly for them, so many Californians are decamping to Texas and Florida that U-Haul cannot keep the trucks in stock. CNS News noted that for the second year in a row, California is number 50 out of 50 states where people want to go. Tough to keep the trucks in stock when nobody’s driving them back.

Of course, California’s jobless rate is the highest in the nation … for the third time in a row.

“Great” job, Gavin.

There’s your West Coast, Messed Coast™ update. Till next time …