CHRISTIANS WIN GAY CAKE BATTLE
But taxpayer faces £500,000 legal bills after equality quango’s action
A CHRISTIAN bakery chain that refused to produce a cake with a gay slogan was vindicated in the country’s highest court yesterday.
Five Supreme Court judges ruled the owners of Ashers Baking Company were within their rights to refuse to bake a cake carrying the slogan ‘Support Gay Marriage’ because it was against their beliefs.
The case was brought by the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (ECNI), leaving the taxpayer facing legal bills of £500,000. The equal rights quango ran up costs of £250,000 and will be asked to pay the same to cover those of Daniel and Amy McArthur, the 29year-old bakery owners.
In May 2014, gay activist Gareth Lee, a regular in the couple’s Belfast shop, asked for a cake decorated with the slogan, the name of the group he supports, QueerSpace, and images of the Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie. After initially taking the £36.50 order, the bakers reconsidered before calling Mr Lee to say they could no longer fulfil it and offering a refund.
They then received a letter from the ECNI saying they had to pay compensation to Mr Lee. Mr McArthur said: ‘They said they would take us to court unless we did three things – pay compensation, apologise for our discrimination and admit that we were wrong.
‘We went back to them and we said we would not apologise for something we hadn’t done.’
Mr McArthur said he feared the decision – which led to four years of legal wrangling – ‘could cost us our business’, adding: ‘There is no doubt we lost some customers, but for everyone we lost, someone would come in the shop who had never been before.’
He said he did not believe his family was targeted by Mr Lee but by the equality quango, which costs £5.5million a year to run.
‘ The ECNI have said they are defending a victim’s rights but as Christians we have certainly felt victimised by the Equality Commission of Northern Ireland,’ he said.
‘They were very biased in their initial approach – they had seen us as an opportunity to further their own same-sex marriage agenda and any disagreement would be stamped out through legal action.’
The McArthurs’ victory marked a rare triumph for Christians in a series of legal battles. In the most notable test case, Christian hoteliers Peter and Hazelmary Bull were told in 2013 that they were wrong to refuse a room to a same-sex couple on the grounds that they were not married.
The Equality Commission seized on Mr Lee’s case in June 2014, accusing the McArthurs of breaking laws from 2007 that prevent businesses from discriminating against customers on grounds of sexual discrimination. The commission then won a series of Northern Ireland court decisions.
But yesterday Supreme Court president Lady Hale, upholding the McArthurs’ appeal, ruled that their objection ‘was to the message and not to any particular person or persons’.
She said the court did not ‘disparage the very real problem of discrimination against gay people… [but] that is not what happened in this case and it does the project of equal treatment no favours to seek to extend it beyond its proper scope’.
Lady Hale added: ‘The bakery could not refuse to provide a cake – or any other of their products – to Mr Lee because he was a gay man or because he supported gay marriage. But that important fact does not amount to a justification for something completely different – obliging them to supply a cake iced with a message with which they profoundly disagreed.
‘In my view, they would be entitled to refuse to do that, whatever the message conveyed by the icing on the cake – support for living in sin, support for a particular political party, support for a particular religious denomination.’
Mr Lee said: ‘This was never about a campaign or a statement.
‘All I wanted was to order a cake in a shop that sold cakes to order. I paid my money, my money was taken and then a few days later it was refused. That made me feel like a second-class citizen. I’m concerned not just for the implications for myself and other gay people, but for every single one of us.’
The ECNI’s chief commissioner Dr Michael Wardlow said: ‘There is a concern that this judgment may raise uncertainty about the application of equality law in the commercial sphere, both about what businesses can do and what customers may expect; and that the beliefs of business owners may take precedence over a customer’s equality rights, which in our view is contrary to what the legislature intended.’
But veteran gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said: ‘This verdict is a victory for freedom of expression. Although I profoundly disagree with Ashers’ opposition to marriage equality, in a free society neither they nor
‘Victory for freedom of expression’
anyone else should be forced to facilitate a political idea that they oppose.
‘If the original judgment against Ashers had been upheld, it would have meant that a Muslim printer could be obliged to publish cartoons of Muhammad and a Jewish printer could be forced to publish a book that propagates holocaust denial.
‘It could have also encouraged far-Right extremists to demand that bakers and other service providers facilitate the promotion of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim opinions.’
Simon Calvert, of the Christian Institute, the evangelical campaign group that financed the McArthurs’ legal fight, said: ‘We are delighted at this commonsense ruling. It is a total vindication of the McArthur family. The United Kingdom has a long and proud tradition of free speech and the ruling is a resounding reassertion of that tradition.’
WITH jaw-dropping effrontery, a banking industry spokesman tells MPs that accountholders should be forced to pay a levy to help foot the bill for compensating fraud victims. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch,’ adds UK Finance chief Stephen Jones.
Leave aside that he represents bankers who’ve enjoyed lavish free lunches at public expense since the multi-billion pound taxpayer-funded bailouts ten years ago.
Forget the colossal profits and bonuses they’ve made from squeezing savers, imposing hidden charges and lending cheap cash at exorbitant interest rates.
The truth is banks themselves bear heavy responsibility for encouraging fraud, through mass branch closures and other means of luring reluctant customers to bank online. Meanwhile, payments extorted by fraudsters go straight into accounts often opened under false names, with few questions asked. Sometimes these are managed by the victims’ own banks, with little attempt made to trace stolen cash.
Indeed, in some cases highlighted by the Mail, corrupt bank staff themselves have sold customers’ details to fraudsters.
Resorting to warped logic, Mr Jones argues that forcing banks to compensate victims would give criminals a ‘perverse incentive’ to target more.
One question: where would be the incentive for banks to clamp down on fraud, if the public were made to pick up the bills?
IN a victory for common sense and freedom of conscience, the Supreme Court finds there was nothing homophobic about a Christian bakery’s refusal to decorate a £36.50 cake with a slogan advocating gay marriage. But how sickening that by funding the case, the Northern Ireland Equality Commission has cost taxpayers £500,000. Are there really so few genuine cases of bigotry in Northern Ireland that it has to spend our cash on trivialities?
WHERE has Jeremy Corbyn been all these years, if he doesn’t realise our schools have long taught about black history, colonialism and the evils of slavery? Indeed, many parents may wish that just once in a while, teachers would pass on some of the good things about Britain – not least, the fact that we led the world in abolishing the slave trade. Schools are about education, Mr Corbyn, not indoctrination.