… here is the UK Supreme Court’s page where you can access the video footage of the hearing and of judgment being given:
I haven’t worked my way through the judgment yet to find out how exactly they squared that circle…
ETA:
And having skimmed it, the judgment seems impeccably argued and btw also references Masterpiece Cakeshop, mostly to point out that that was a rather different scenario.
It seems to me it is going to lead to some odd results (i.e. one could presumably refuse to prepare a cake with an Islamic religious message to a Muslim for Eid due to one’s Christian faith but one couldn’t refuse to sell them a generic cake because they are Muslims. What if you know it is for an Eid celebration?) but I can see why they reached the conclusion they did.
Mmph.
I can’t say I’m happy with the outcome, but having read through the judgement I agree that the legal theory underpinning it is sound.
It seems to me it is going to lead to some odd results (i.e. one could presumably refuse to prepare a cake with an Islamic religious message to a Muslim for Eid due to one’s Christian faith but one couldn’t refuse to sell them a generic cake because they are Muslims. What if you know it is for an Eid celebration?)
Based on the way the judge addressed the issues in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, I would think that knowing the cake is for an Eid celebration wouldn’t be a good enough reason to refuse service – in that case, celebrating Eid would probably be considered indissociable from being a Muslim in much the same way that having a gay wedding would be indissociable from being gay, and thus would fall within the legal protections.
Or so I infer.
The key argument in the finding here is that they would (theoretically) have happily sold him as many cakes as he wanted to take to his event, even knowing what it was for, but they wouldn’t sell a cake saying “support gay marriage” to anybody, even if they were a straight Christian who wanted it for a church bake sale.
Sounds like they’re slicing things pretty thin, but it makes a certain kind of pedantic sense - which as I understand it is the kind of sense things are supposed to make in matters of law.
I suppose it does make sense, in a really pedantic way; baker still gets to be a bigot by stating he can be a bigot about everything rather than just homophobic?
Doesn’t read as nicely though, does it?
