Open Letter From a former customer of Proposition 8 Supporters to Ken and Wendy Lee
Dear Mr. Ken Kiwook Lee and Wendy Wonok Lee:
As the owners of the Bubble Bath Hand Car Wash located at 1831 W 213th St Torrance CA 90501 I wanted you to know that while I always used to be very satisfied with the service I received when I used to patronize your business, I haven’t been there since before the November election and I am enclosing the Bubble Bath get one for free after ten washes card which I have cut in half.
Because of your having allowed or directed the placement of Yes on Proposition 8 signs at your business, I will no longer be patronizing the establishment. It means that instead of driving to a location in my immediate neighborhood, I will have drive several miles to another car wash, but I am willing to do so because I do not give my dollars to promote a message that discrimination against minority groups in society is alright.
When I was a young boy growing up in California, the Unruh Civil Rights Act, now Section 51 of the California Civil Code was being debated. To protest this new law, which prohibited segregation in California businesses, some business owners made their views very dramatic and very plain. As a child I had to witness a restaurant off the freeway heading North out of the San Fernando Valley towards the Antelope Valley where a gigantic sign had been put on the wall of the restaurant by the owner. It said, “No Niggers, Jews, or Dogs Allowed.”
I gather from your names that you are probably Korean immigrants or of Korean heritage. I have many Korean friends and I welcome them to my country as I do all immigrants. If somebody were to put up a sign in their business that made Koreans feel unwelcome, I would be the first to stop patronizing that establishment.
I feel the same way about my Gay and Lesbian friends and I know that they must feel the same kind of humiliation and anger that I felt seeing that sign as a child–because I am Jewish–that they feel when somebody tells them they don’t have the right to marry because some religions in America have a different definition of marriage that they want to impose on everybody.
Maybe it never occurred to you, but the Unitarian-Universalist Association, the Union for Reform Judaism, and the United Church of Christ amongst others have a different religious outlook than yours which accepts same-sex marriage on an equal basis with opposite-sex marriage. Who are you, or anybody else, to say that their personal or their church’s definition of marriage has a right to be imposed as a theological outlook on anybody else in America by putting it in a state constitution?
The United States Supreme Court wrote in 1985 in Wallace vs. Jaffree that:
The fundamental concept of liberty embodied in that Amendment embraces the liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment. The First Amendment declares that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The Fourteenth Amendment has rendered the legislatures of the states as incompetent as Congress to enact such laws. The constitutional inhibition of legislation on the subject of religion has a double aspect. On the one hand, it forestalls compulsion by law of the acceptance of any creed or the practice of any form of worship. Freedom of conscience and freedom to adhere to such religious organization or form of worship as the individual may choose cannot be restricted by law. On the other hand, it safeguards the free exercise of the chosen form of religion.” [citing Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 303 (1940)]
