(ethereal music)
- When it comes to LGBTQ rights,
allies play a crucial role in the fight for equality.
And in recent years, the battle has been raging
in an unlikely arena, bakeries.
Back in 2014, a Colorado baker claimed he had the right
to deny a gay couple service based on his religious beliefs.
And when he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court,
they ruled in his favor.
Since then, cake has been the symbolic center of the fight
for equality as so-called religious freedom laws
have cropped up in several states across the country,
including here in Mississippi
where I recently visited a baker
in the heart of the Bible Belt
who risked putting his business on the line
to take a stand for gay rights.
(bell dings)
- [Mitchell] Welcome!
- Are you Mitchell? - I am.
- Well, I'm buyin'.
- Ah, I'm sellin'. - Oh, perfect.
- (laughs) Welcome.
(bright guitar music)
- All right, so I'll have a petit four and a green tea.
- All right.
- And I'd love to hear about the sign you have on your door.
- Sure thing.
Go ahead and have a seat. I'll come right around.
- Sweet.
- So talk to me about the we don't discriminate sign.
Where did all of that start?
- In 2014, Mississippi decides
to pass this religious freedom restoration act
that said that I would have the right as a baker
to discriminate against somebody
for whatever I could claim was my religious exemption.
The governor was saying how bakeries
were being harmed if they didn't pass this law.
Nobody ever called me to say, "Hey, we're taking a poll
from the governor's office trying
to figure out what we should do about this law."
And so I said, "Hey, I wanna do something
that says to people I actually actively don't want
to discriminate against anybody for anything."
I just wanna sell you a cake. That's all I wanna do.
If you're buying, I'm selling.
And so we designed the sticker, we printed them up,
and started going around to businesses,
asking, "Hey, do you wanna put a sticker on?"
- So are there other businesses out here
that think like you in this area?
- Yes.
A lot in this area took the stickers,
put it on their windows, put it on their doors,
and then we started getting calls
from people in Biloxi, calls from people in Kentucky,
calls from people in New Hampshire.
"Hey, we saw the campaign, and we want a sticker."
And so we would send out stickers on our dime.
Anybody who wanted one could get one.
- No one asked you to go out
and give these stickers to businesses.
No organization came to you and said,
"Hey, can you put this - Nobody.
- on your door?"
Do you consider yourself an ally?
- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, most definitely.
I have a business, and so there came that point
of hey, are you here to serve people or are you not?
And does that mean all people, or is it just some people?
And I decided, business on the line,
to come out as an ally in the state of Mississippi,
saying loudly, "I'm here to serve everyone."
That can ruffle some feathers.
We got like hundreds of supportive calls.
Got a couple that were less supportive,
but that's the moment.
You have to decide who you are.
- Did you have a lot of relationships
with LGBTQ folks just in your personal life?
What's your relationship like with the LGBTQ community?
- So I'm a straight male, but I was a theater major
in college, and so I was introduced
to people in the community as early as 1992.
I don't know of many people who were out,
who were living their lives open.
At that time, even at the age of 18,
what I knew about gay people was all negative.
- What were some of the things that you knew about
that was commonly said about gay people at that time?
- They're all pedophiles, they all want to find young boys,
you don't go to the parks at night
because that's where they all meet, all of this stuff.
It was the Boogeyman. They were the Boogeyman.
And then I meet my first gay man,
and I meet my first gay woman,
and they're like normal people.
And so you start to realize how tough it must be
and how difficult it has been for them
to just to be who they are and the fact
that they are scared to death everyday
that somebody's gonna attack 'em.
That was quite a lesson.
- How do you think having experiences with folks
who have a different life experience than you
has affected your outlook on life now?
- As trite as it sounds, it has made me who I am
and has built in my mind the idea that we're all the same.
(people cheering)
And that's something that a vast majority
of people in Mississippi don't believe.
They think of the gay agenda. What is the gay agenda?
It's to go and get a cup of coffee and come have a donut.
And so we should be allowed to have the same life,
but we're not, and especially in Mississippi we're not.
In Mississippi, we are told from an early age,
"Keep everything separate, blacks, whites, gays, straights.
These are separate groups. They should not intermingle.
Keep everybody separate." So we have to fight.
We have to fight everyday and push against it just
to tell people we're all the same.
- So you called yourself an ally. What's an ally?
- Somebody who thinks that you are no different
than I am and that you deserve
to have the exact same opportunities that I have,
somebody who understands that there's right
and there's wrong, and I'm gonna do what's right.
And so for me, it's as simple as that.
(ethereal guitar music)
- What is an ally?
- An ally is a verb. It is an action word.
- Someone who will stand up for us
when we're not in the room.
- Will be there on the front lines when I need them.
- Someone that protects the community.
- Is in the trenches with you.
- The person that drives the getaway car.
- An ally, quite frankly, is an accomplice.
- It means really creating change
in a radical way through love.
(thumping upbeat music)