I imagine that Daniel and Amy McArthur, owners of Ashers bakery in Northern Ireland, may well want to celebrate their victory in the Supreme Court with a spot of baking today. If so, I suggest this slogan should be written in icing: the equality industry stinks. It has taken Ashers four years and a sequence of court hearings, costing them £200,000 in legal fees, to establish what should have been obvious from the beginning: that no, they didn’t discriminate against a gay couple when they refused to bake a cake bearing the words ‘Support Gay Marriage’ in 2014.
Why on Earth did it take so long, and why did the Belfast County Court and Court of Appeal come up with perverse rulings along the way that Ashers bakery had discriminated against the couple? Yes, we have a law which makes it illegal for businesses to refuse to provide a service on the grounds of a customer’s sexuality.
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