Can’t we all just agree to disagree? Candace Cameron Bure and Raven-Symone got into a heated debate on the set of The View on Tuesday, July 7, over an Oregon bakery’s refusal to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple, but on Wednesday, July 8, Bure tried to set the record straight.
“I wasn’t there to debate gay marriage or straight marriage,” she told conservative website TheBlaze. “It was about these bakers and their religious freedoms and the freedom of association.”
The bakers in question are Aaron and Melissa Klein, of Sweet Cakes by Melissa bakery, who controversially refused to make a wedding cake for Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer earlier this month on the grounds of the ceremony conflicting with their Christian beliefs.
The Kleins are currently being ordered to pay $135,000 to compensate the Bowman-Cryers for the emotional and mental anguish they suffered when the Kleins refused to make their wedding cake.
During Tuesday’s show, Symone likened the bakers’ decision to historic discrimination against African-Americans, but Bure stood firm in her beliefs.
“This is about freedom of association, it’s about constitutional rights, it’s about First Amendment rights,” she said. “We do have the right to still choose who we associate with.”
During TheBlaze interview, Bure, 39, defended her statements on The View, explaining that she wanted to express her genuine opinions, even if they were not well-received.
“I wanted to be as truthful and honest and speak in love as much as I could, but just be factual about things,” the former Full House actress said. “And that’s really where I was coming from.”
Bure added that she and Symone, 29, hugged during a commercial break following their on-air clash, and that several of her gay friends reached out to her after the segment aired on The View.
“My favorite part were all the texts that I got from my … very close gay friends that were saying, ‘We love you and we can all have different opinions, and you fight for what you believe in and I’m going to fight for what I believe in,’” she said.
“It’s always interesting to hear where everyone’s coming from,” she added. “We can learn to have respectful conversations with people that we don’t agree with.”
