Copycat serves Azucar Bakery with yet another religious discrimination complaint

January 23 — The audio is garbled at first, and features a clamor not unlike devices colliding as a call is awkwardly recorded. “Hello? Hello?” an impatient male calls out. A young woman confirms she’s there.

“Yes, hi. I’d like to order a cake, please.”

And so begins another mission to buy a very specific kind of cake from Denver’s Azucar Bakery.

The man’s vocal demeanor sets off a red flag for the attendant, however; he rushes and fumbles while building his order, asking for the name of the attendant and making her confirm twice that she’ll write the message he wants on the cake. He says he needs to feed 12, but hastily chooses a cake that feeds 60, and his line of questioning is tinged with a suspiciously insincere nature that’s already sent one pastry chef to flag down a superior to take over the order.

And her doubt makes sense.

The call comes days on the heels of the biggest news story ever centered on the small Peruvian bakery, and the staff is in the throes of a media frenzy after refusing to write a disparaging comment about God and gays on a cake. The amount of calls of support have been welcome, but the threats from angry callers from have put everyone at Azucar on edge. Now there’s a guy on the phone who’s putting the team on alert with his insistence that a yet-to-be-revealed message be written in fancy letters on his cake.

It all feels very, very familiar.

After building his order, the young woman asks for his message.

“It has to say on it the following,” he declares with deliberate articulation. “The Bible says gay marriage is wrong.”

There is an uncomfortable silence that lasts more than a beat.

“We can’t actually say that on our cake,” she begins, before he cuts her off.

“Uhhhh, that’s against federal law — it’s discrimination if you don’t, and this call is being recorded, so if you violate federal law, you can get into a lot of trouble.” She states her position again, then asks if he’d like to speak to her manager. He agrees, but when the young woman returns, she says the team has decided it’s best to wait for the owner to return. The man is not pleased.

“So you and your boss think it’s ok to discriminate against people? You know that’s illegal, right? You’re discriminating against people who oppose gay marriage, and that’s illegal. You can’t discriminate based on someone’s religious beliefs. Listen, this call is being recorded so you can’t say later on you didn’t know or you weren’t told. I told you several times, so you can’t say well oh, you didn’t know — you did know, because I warned you many times now it’s discrimination and it’s illegal. This entire recording is going to be used against the company to prove you’ve been discriminating.”

The woman remains calm. “I will write down the message that you would like on the cake, and the owner will call you to see if we can write it or not,” she offers.

“That’s not good enough,” he says. The recording ends. (We’ve included a link to the recording below.)

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Since the initial story centered around Azucar Bakery and its alleged religious discrimination broke on January 18, owner Marjorie Silva has been inundated with calls, emails, and letters of support. “Most of them are incredibly nice,” she says, bright-eyed and in good spirits on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 14. She’s surprisingly upbeat for someone who’s been through a whirlwind of a year. Her story has been picked up by every major news outlet in the United States, had a plot-driving role on CBS’ “The Good Wife,” and was parodied by The Onion and Saturday Night Live. People from all around the world, including Peru, New Zealand, Ukraine, England, and Spain have flooded her inbox with thank-you letters, and she’s had to ramp up the overtime hours for employees as business has boomed in the wake of the story.

“I have people coming into the store just to hug me,” she says. “So many tell me they’re Christians who support me. I still get really mean messages, people calling me fat cow and saying I’m going to hell, but that’s ok.”

It’s par for the course — Marjorie’s life has an apparent sweet-and-sour theme lately.

Earlier this month, the Colorado Civil Rights Division determined that Marjorie didn’t violate William “Bill” Jack’s civil rights for denying him a cake that declared — in so many words — that God doesn’t approve of gay people. Though on one hand something to celebrate, she says she was also informed by her attorneys to ready herself for court. Expecting Jack to quickly appeal, she isn’t exactly thrilled at having to take time off for depositions, hearings, and the rest of the tedium that goes with being sued. “My lawyer thinks this is just the beginning — not the end,” she sighs, excusing herself briefly. There is a line forming, and the young attendant in a chef jacket needs some assistance.

When Marjorie returns, she puts a big white envelope on the table and takes a seat. Judging by her body language, this isn’t good news.

“And now I have to go through it all over again,” she says. I remove the contents of the envelope grimly, as the letterhead is a familiar one.

It appears that on March 6, Robert Mannarino filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission against Azucar Bakery citing that — because the bakery wouldn’t write “The Bible says gay marriage is wrong” on a cake — he is the victim of religious discrimination.

Mannarino writes under the Personal Harm section:

“That on or about January 23, 2015, I was denied services by a place of public accommodation based on my creed (Christianity).”

Under the Discrimination Statement section, Mannarino writes:

“I believe I was unlawfully discriminated against because of my creed in violation of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. 1) On or about January 23, 2015, I attempted to purchase a cake from the respondent. 2) I expressed that I wanted the cake to state “The Bible says gay marriage is wrong” but the respondent refused to take the order. 3) Only after I alluded to the specific message did the respondent deny the service. 4) I believe I was discriminated against based on my protected class.”

And so it’s confirmed: Marjorie Silva is dealing with Bill Jack’s copycat.

“I called my lawyer crying,” she admits. “And since then, he’s gone onto so many wedding review websites and left me one star [out of five].” Her eyes are wide with disbelief. “I’ve worked eight years to get all those reviews and [remain] at five stars, then he leaves nasty messages and brings it down to four.” She says that people who are planning their weddings use sites like TheKnot.com. WeddingWire.com, and MyWedding.com to steer them toward places they feel they can trust.

“Things like that affect my business, you know? This is how I pay my bills.” She shakes her head. “I feel like I’m being targeted.”

She tells me about a politician who started visiting around the same time Mannarino called. She says he came banging on her windows three hours before the store opened, alarming the staff as they prepped for the day’s business. “The guy left some papers and said he wanted me to go [to the state capitol] with him.” She took the documents and gave the local LGBT political advocacy group, One Colorado, a ring.

“I’m from Peru, so there’s a language barrier,” she says of the legalese on the paperwork. “I didn’t fully understand what it was saying.” When she sat down with members from One Colorado to sort out the details, they knew immediately who came calling.

State Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt of Colorado Springs — also known as Dr. Chaps, his YouTube alter ego — is an outspoken religious-right Republican who’s against homosexuality and gay marriage. (You might remember the guy being admonished by the public — and his peers in the Colorado House — for suggesting that the Longmont baby cut from its mother’s belly was the result of a “curse of God upon America for our sin of not protecting innocent children in the womb.”)

“[Klingenschmitt] said that if I don’t go [to the capitol], then everyone would only hear Bill Jack’s side of the story,” she says. After a few rounds of unwanted communication from Klingenschmitt, Marjorie hired a PR expert who advised her to keep her distance from him.  After reviewing the documents and going over his track record on gay issues with One Colorado, Marjorie says she also agreed it was probably best to steer clear of him, so as not to make a rough situation any worse. Now that she’s dealing with the second complaint case, she’s more interested in focusing on as much work at the bakery as possible.

A dyed-in-the-wool optimist, Marjorie wants to make a tumultuous time a more virtuous one. Not only did she tackle the mountain of extra orders, baking cookies from sun up to sun down, but she gave people who couldn’t patronize the shop for treats the opportunity to show their support through shirt sales.

In the end, though, with much of the cost for her attorney out of the way, she wants to use the financial support for “something beautiful.”

“After the story, I got so many calls from teenagers who were kicked out of their homes for being who they are,” she says. “It made me think about people I know back home who were treated poorly for being gay.” She says she’s been inspired by numerous LGBT youth advocacy programs here in Colorado and would like to recreate something similar for LGBT youth back home in Peru.

“We didn’t have anything like that growing up,” she says, adding that she wants to use the money to make a difference in the lives of teenagers who still don’t have those kinds of resources.

But for now, Marjorie is contending with the uphill battle of running a business that’s also a target of religious discrimination activists who build platforms on hate-cakes. Still, she remains positive.

“For every 10,000 kind messages, there are maybe 10 bad ones,” she says. “I think that shows the world is going the right way.”

She sighs. “But here we go again.”

Click here to watch Mannarino’s YouTube video of the phone call.