The case was banal enough. It was one of those cases of a woke municipality deciding that if you didn’t want to bake that cake that you couldn’t do much of anything else either.

Steve Tennes is the proprietor of a family owned orchard in Michigan. He is an actual Roman Catholic who follows Church teachings (at least as they are today because our current Pope and his gay mafia hit men like Fr. James Martin seem hellbent on normalizing the homosexual agenda and most everything else). He allows weddings to be held on his farm, what he doesn’t allow is homosexual weddings to be held. All was well and good until someone in East Lansing’s city government discovered this factoid and linked it another fact: the Tennes family orchard participates in the East Lansing Farmer’s Market.

SOON: Senators question a President Trump judicial pick who once argued a case AGAINST a #Catholic farmer who was banned from the East Lansing farmers' market for the farmer's stance on marriage. pic.twitter.com/nkt0NK6DKr

— Jason Calvi (@JasonCalvi) May 22, 2019

The city got its gay on and declared the as he didn’t allow homosexual weddings on his property, he could not participate in the Farmer’s Market and then changed their existing policy to make obeying East Lansing’s “anti-discrimination” policy a requirement of participating.

The Alliance Defending Freedom represented Tennes, who eventually prevailed.

East Lansing was represented by a guy named Michael Bogren, who is a partner in  a law firm hired by the city to defend it. And defend it he did. He pointedly compared Catholic opposition to same-sex marriage to the KKK using the Bible to justify opposition to interracial marriage.

Bogren countered that the message the city is sending is “discriminators need not apply.”
“This is not about speech and it’s not about religion,” the city’s attorney told the judge. “It’s about discrimination.”

and

Bogren expressed frustration with Anderson’s insistence that Tennes’ refusal to hold same sex weddings was not discrimination.

“The fact that the plaintiff says, ‘My religion compels me,’ does not protect him,” Bogren said. “There’s a difference between belief and act.”

That last utterance is straight from the Barack Obama “Freedom of worship” playbook. That is, you are welcome to believe whatever you wish but if you try to live it, well, there’s going to be a problem.

For reasons that aren’t all that clear, Bogren ended up a Trump nominee to a the federal judgeship for the Western District of Michigan. Bogren is about 20 years older than a typical Trump judge. His views on the First Amendment are clearly out of step with most Republicans. His only saving grace is that both of Michigan’s Democrat senators support him and so, one suspects, that after ramming six judges into the Ninth Circuit in opposition to Democrat senators, someone in the White House decided to make kissy-face.

Someone who didn’t let this go buy was freshman senator Josh Hawley. If you want to see a judicial nominee have his own bigotry shoved back in his face, you have to watch this:

Senator Josh Hawley grilling judicial nominee over his anti-Catholic rhetoric:

"No, you specifically compared this Catholic family's adherence to their religious beliefs with the views of the KKK."

Senator Hawley then reminds everyone of the Masterpiece Cake Shop SCOTUS Case pic.twitter.com/4YsoDKy8x0

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) May 22, 2019

You really have to listen to this. Bogren tries to weasel his way out of the inflammatory statements he made but Hawley was having none of it.

Odds are that Bogren gets his seat but this is a shameful sell out by the Trump administration in awarding a judgeship as a bauble to a man who obviously holds religious belief in total contempt.

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