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
‘Victory for freedom of expression’
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