Northern Irish bakers get reprieve as AG and major gay activist come to their defense
The Northern Ireland attorney general has intervened in the
Ashers Bakery case, which saw a Christian family enterprise fined 500 pounds
for refusing to bake a cake bearing the words "Support Gay Marriage"
by questioning whether the law they broke is itself in violation of Northern
Ireland's constitution.
The intervention came at the beginning of the hearing into the
McArthurs' appeal, which the lord chief justice of Northern Ireland, Sir Declan
Morgan, grudgingly delayed until May as a result.
The A.G. is asking the court whether Northern Ireland's law
banning workplace discrimination "impedes or places a burden on certain
forms of political or religious expression given the prohibition of
discrimination on the grounds of religious belief or political opinion
contained in section 24 (1) (c) and (d) of the Northern Ireland Act 1998,"
the latter being a constitutional document.
Simon Calvert, a spokesman for the Christian Institute, which is
providing legal counsel for the McArthurs, said the attorney general's
arguments had nothing to do with their case. "We were ready to go today,
but we respect the legal process, and we will be back again on 9 May."
The attorney general's concerns emerged only two days after
British human rights and homosexual rights activist Peter Tatchell announced in
a Guardian opinion piece that he had changed his mind on the Ashers case and
now believed that the McArthurs should win their appeal in the name of
freedom of religion and thought.
"Much as I wish to defend the gay community, I also want to
defend freedom of conscience, expression and religion," wrote Tatchell.
"In my view, it is an infringement of freedom to require businesses to aid
the promotion of ideas to which they conscientiously object. Discrimination
against people should be unlawful, but not against ideas."
If the Ashers lost, Tatchell worried later on the BBC,
"Jewish printers could be required to print books by a Holocaust
denier" or Muslims to print "cartoons of Mohammed."
Showing a solid grasp of Northern Ireland's embattled history of
inter-religious strife, Tatchell also told Guardian readers, "Northern
Ireland's laws against discrimination … were designed to heal the sectarian
divide by preventing the denial of jobs, housing and services to people because
of their politics. There was never an intention [to make people] promote
political ideas with which they disagreed."
As Tatchell explained later to the BBC, he would still condemn
Ashers Bakery if its staff had refused to bake a cake for the plaintiff in the
case, Gareth Lee, simply because he was homosexual. But in fact their objection
was to the message they were asked to put on the cake along with two Sesame
Street characters, Bert and Ernie, locked in a homosexual embrace.
Tatchell may have been trying to mitigate any backlash from the
homosexual lobby when he then added that the McArthur family's religious
beliefs "are, to my mind, theologically unsound[.] … They claim to be
Christians, yet Jesus never once condemned homosexuality, and discrimination is
not a Christian value."
Founder of the group OutRage! and head of the Peter Tatchell
Foundation, a human rights group, the Australian-born activist has stirred
controversy by calling for sexual liberation of five-year-olds and by denying
the existence of the so-called "gay gene."
