The ingredients of discrimination
Bakers cook up a controversy that is all too familiar to the gay community, writes Sophie Donaldson
HERE’S a rhetorical question for you: should a Jewish baker be able to refuse to bake a wedding cake for a Muslim couple on the grounds of religious belief ? Australian conservative politician Kevin Andrews thinks so.
While the Australian Senate finally passed the marriage equality bill last Thursday, enabling same-sex couples to marry, the weeks and months leading up to that moment were fraught with debate, such as Andrews’s appearance on Sky News in which he insisted that, should the vote pass, bakers should have the right to refuse service to samesex couples. Many of his fellow conservatives warmed to the theme and it became such a cause for concern that Tony Smith, head of the Baking Association of Australia, had to ask “What baker in their right mind would not bake someone a cake?”
Obviously, he had not heard of Ashers Bakery, the Northern Irish chain founded by a Christian couple that refused to make a cake with a slogan supporting gay marriage and was found guilty of discrimination in 2015.
No doubt Smith has his head in his hands at the prominent legal case currently being heard in the United States’ Supreme Court. In 2012, Charlie Craig and David Mullins entered Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver, Colorado, hoping to order a custom wedding cake.
The owner and baker Jack Phillips refused to do so, citing his Christian beliefs. The couple filed a complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which forbids businesses to discriminate against customers based on their sexual orientation, race, religion or gender. This resulted in a court case in which Phillips was found guilty of discrimination and told to change his company policy — which also happened to be his personal belief system. He appealed and petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case. Proceedings commenced last week and a verdict is expected to be delivered in June.
The case against Phillips appears to threaten two things that many Americans hold very dearly; Christianity and their constitutional rights. Phillips argues that his right to religious freedom and freedom of expression are being encroached upon by being forced to create a cake in sup- port of something he himself does not support. He considers himself an artist, his cake the canvas and his icing the paint, and therefore the finished product is not a baked good but an artistic expres- sion. It was this argument that was rejected by the Colorado Court of Appeals, a decision that prompted Phillips to approach the Supreme Court.
When Charlie Craig and David Mullins asked Jack Phillips to bake them a cake, they did not require his religious beliefs to be altered. They did not expect him to approve of their union. They only expected him, as a business owner, to treat them in the same manner he would any other customer. When this didn’t happen, I don’t imagine that Charlie Craig and David Mullins were surprised. Certainly, they would have been hurt. It’s quite clear they were angry. I would estimate they were taken aback for about a tenth of a nano-second before that familiar feeling set in, a feeling that most people are unable to truly comprehend.
That is why, when discussing these incidents, our language is peppered with analogies, such as Jewish baker and Muslim couple, so that straight people who have never experienced such discrimination can attempt to empathise with gay people. It was what actress Sarah Paulson recently described as ‘societal concern’ and what the irrepressible Panti Bliss describes as ‘checking yourself ’.
It is the mental equivalent of constantly pulling yourself up, of adjusting your identity as a gay person in accordance with your surroundings. You constantly field your own unrelenting questions: is it safe to hold hands on this street? Will a peck on the lips result in leery comments at best, physical assault at worst? How many times will we have to insist to reception that we don’t want a twin room, but a double bed? Will a bakery refuse to make us a wedding cake?
These are the types of questions non-straight people ask themselves, not because we are self-obsessed or overly cautious, but because through learned experience we are acutely aware that we are considered different. We are also aware that just because a group of politicians deems us ‘equal’ does not mean that rest of the population agrees.
We are aware that a faction of people still considers us lesser. For the most part, we accept this. We avoid those streets. We don’t hold hands, and we certainly don’t steal a kiss. We swallow our awkwardness when checking into the hotel. We go to another bakery. Perhaps every person has a limit within themselves of how long they are willing or able to accept this. Or perhaps it happens at random. Whatever the trigger is, it often results in high-profile cases like this which appear to a majority of the population to be about a cake, while a minority understands that it is not about one discrimination, but about a lifetime of them.
‘We are acutely aware that we are considered different’