HUGO RIFKIND
Free speech and the right not to bake a cake
fundamentally, is what this case comes down
to. Is there such a thing as the right not to bake
a cake? And crucially, is it a greater or lesser
right than the right to buy a cake? When one
individual baker boycotts gay cake sloganeer-
ing, it may seem heavy- handed to prosecute.
What, though, if all bakers did? What if no
baker in the land was prepared to write ‘SUP-
PORT GAY MARRIAGE’ on a cake? Or, to turn
it around, what if it was Christians who found
themselves turned away from bakeries? What
if, say, all bakers everywhere were gay atheists
and, when asked for hot cross buns at Easter,replied, ‘Sorry, no, we shan’t do crosses, you
may only have these buns here, on each of
which, my God-fearing friend, we have drawn
a willy’? What of your freedom then?
I am not the only person to have been con-
fused. Peter Tatchell, whose convictions are
firm, awe-inspiring and increasingly unpre-
dictable, started out condemning the Ashers
and then ended up supporting them, although
also damning them, like a man who has
walked into a hall of mirrors and walked out
again with a bloody nose after crashing into
the back of his own head. The ruling against
Ashers, he wrote this week, ‘implies that gay
bakers could be forced by law to decorate
cakes with homophobic slogans’. Although
I’m not sure that’s quite right, because ‘Sup-port gay marriage’ isn’t really the equiva-
lent of a homophobic slogan for Christians,
any more than ‘Support West Ham’ would
be for somebody who supports Aston Villa.
Although, that being said, you wouldn’t
expect a Villa fan baker to end up in court
for refusing to make a West Ham cake, would
you? Or at least last week you wouldn’t have.
Maybe after this you would.
Personally, I’m of the view that you don’t
have to agree with everything you write on a
cake. If the McArthurs had taken themselves
a little less seriously, none of this would have
happened. Even more so, though, the same is
clearly true of Lee. When we read these days
of Generation Snowflake, unable to stomach
the views of others, we expect to learn of stu-
dents, bickering over gender identity. It turns
out that Christian bakers and middle-aged
activists behave no better. Agree to disagree,
the lot of you. Be nicer. Or if you can’t, just
shut your cakeholes. Once this sort of non-
sense gets to court, all the outcomes are bad.Brexit ruins my case for the Union
I can feel my views on Scottish independ-
ence changing. Not enough to write a column
about it, perhaps, but enough to sneak in a
mention down here. Scotland voted to stay in
the EU, and England didn’t, and this some-
how changes everything. People who argue
that Scotland also voted to stay in the UK,
and so should lump it, miss that point, prob-
ably on purpose. Every aspect of Scotland’s
settlement with the wider UK, from devolu-
tion to the Barnett formula, accepts that the
effect of straightforward majority UK rule
needs to be mitigated for the Union to sur-
vive. Brexit is a deviation from this.
Independence still seems like a bad idea.
Economically, I’m pretty sure, it would be an
even madder act of folly than it would have
been last time. Still, the unionist case I made
last time, and believed in, was emotional
and cultural more than it was financial, and
I’m honestly not sure I could make it again.
‘Bought and sold for English gold,’ sneered
the Nats back in 2014. Next time, they’ll be
right.Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.L
et us consider the case of the Ash-
ers family bakery in Belfast which, in
2014, refused to make a cake. Or as
some would have it, a ‘gay cake’, although
that’s obviously ridiculous because all cakes
are quite gay. This one, though, was request-
ed by Gareth Lee, a local gay rights activist,
who wanted it to have a picture of Bert and
Ernie from Sesame Street on it, under the slo-
gan ‘SUPPORT GAY MARRIAGE’, as the centre-
piece of an event organised to do just that.
On the basis that they were devout Chris-
tians, however, the family running this family
bakery refused. And so, sore affronted, Lee
sued. Really, if anybody ought to be suing
here it’s Bert and Ernie, who are simply two
grown puppets who share a house and should
be free to define themselves however they
please. They’re in America, though, so maybe
they didn’t hear about it.
Last year, a court decided that the McAr-
thurs, who run Ashers, had, indeed, discrimi-
nated against Lee by refusing the cake. This
week, the Court of Appeal finally decided
that, yes indeed, discrimination occurred. All
in all, a hell of a fuss about a cake. Or more
accurately, about no cake.
It goes all over the place, this. Every
theme, every line of thought twists back on to
itself. If there is a free speech angle, for exam-
ple (and I’m pretty sure there is), in which
direction does it go? Was Lee being denied
free speech because they wouldn’t make his
cake? Or were the McArthurs being denied
free speech because they were having to write
words they didn’t want to? Some have sug-
gested it has been a case about gay rights,
although it might not have been, because the
McArthurs would presumably have refused
to make the same cake for a straight person,
too. Others have suggested it was about reli-
gious rights, although that doesn’t sound quite
right, either, because if a religious person has
the right not to bake a cake then presumably
so does anybody. Also, I’m pretty sure ‘Thou
shalt not make a Bert and Ernie equal mar-
riage cake’ is not one of the Ten Command-
ments, anyway.
Obviously, the fact that the last paragraph
included the phrase ‘the right not to bake a
cake’ in a serious news publication, in cold
blood, is worthy of concern in itself. Yet this,
You wouldn’t expect an Aston Villa
fan to end up in court for refusing to
make a West Ham cake, would you?