The vote last month on same sex marriage in the Republic of Ireland represents a sea change in social attitudes and brings into stark relief the rejection (four times so far) by the Northern Ireland Assembly of equal marriage legislation.
In addition, the announcement by the Christian Institute that it would back an appeal of the recent legal ruling against Asher’s, the Belfast bakery owners who refused to ice a celebration cake with wording that celebrated same sex marriage, shows full acceptance of equality is still a complex matter.
The defendants in the Bakery case clearly have an agenda, the promotion of a reactionary understanding of ‘Christian freedom’. Nevertheless many commentators, including those on the liberal end of the spectrum, have expressed discomfort with the ruling. It appears intolerant (forcing people to act against their religious instincts) and trivial (it’s about a cake!)
The principle on which the bakery case ruling was made, however, is sound when viewed from an equality perspective. The law covers all services whether public or private, whether a matter of life or death or a matter of culinary choice. To abandon this principle would allow businesses or individual employees to offer a differential service to individuals or groups of people on the basis of their sexual orientation. If you substitute the word race, or indeed religion, for sexual orientation in the previous sentence you can see the potential seriousness of the situation.
In Northern Ireland the proposed solution to this apparent impasse between equality and (some people’s) belief has been opt outs on the basis of ‘conscience’. However it is predictable that the right to opt out would encourage divisive stand offs which will be exploited by certain religious and political groupings.
A better way out of the impasse may, surprisingly, be found by following biblical principle. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus exhorts us to live in a non judging way (Matt 7 v1-3). I would suggest this means we have to reject a balance or ‘trade off’ between the right to express beliefs and the right to equality, for ‘not judging’ is a matter of both equality and belief.
When Pope Francis said ‘if a person is gay and seeks God ….who am I to judge?’, it is unlikely he had temporarily forgotten he was the leader of the Church with its doctrinal teaching on sex, sexuality and institutional power. He was instead making reference to something else important to him as a person of faith – his humble equality with all other human beings as children of God.
This is surely where we should start. We need to develop a social space that goes beyond mere ‘tolerance’, beyond a liberal balancing of competing faith based and secular views, to one which can actually enable and enrich social solidarity. We need to return to the deeper inclusive values of Christian tradition, based on the virtue of humility.
Maria is the Chair of the Cutting Edge Consortium which promotes equality in the debate on faith, sexuality and gender identity.
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Has it occurred to Jim McCrea that what religious freedom really is, is not as qualified relatively to different prejudices about it, but is what it is, absolutely without qualification; and that religious freedom has, among other things, to be moral? There is no religious freedom to be immoral, nor by implication, to be hypocritical. Not so irreligious freedom! Irreligious freedom is amoral, “boldly transgressional” against all moral “taboos”, and made self-servingly so by inability to tell reason from sentiment.
A current irreligious word, for instance, for “disingenuousness”, is “equal marriage”.
you disagree, you cite scriptures to bolster your case, you sermonise and moralise, and nowhere is there any balanced discussion of the rights of the bakery which seems to be forced to conform-- or else! Sound totatlitarian to you? Are you sure you are really promoting equality in the debate?
Has it occurred to your blogger that the person who ordered the cake from Ashers Bakery and thereby instigated this case clearly had every bit as much of "an agenda" as she suggests the defendants had. Like many other family businesses in Northern Ireland, they are well-known for their faithful Evangelical principles. This was probably not simply a case of ordering a cake from the first cake-shop you met but one that was carefully targeted as it was likely to refuse and so give an opening for a court case.
Maria Exall has completely missed the point of this case. If a straight person had asked for the cake with that slogan and been refused, it couldn't be an equality issue. Speighdd is perfectly correct, the baker objected to the slogan, not to the person ordering it. it's the same as if a printer with strong pro-life views refused to print literature promoting abortion because it was against their principles, and before anyone jumps to conclusions I am not equating gay marriage with abortion. Surely a service provider is entitled to refuse work that contradicts their deeply held religious or indeed political beliefs?
Unlike Maria Excell and socialists generally, the Bible is not so exclusively fixated on equality as to blurr all moral boundaries, in particular the one between virtue and vice. Jesus Christ did not condemn the woman taken in adultery, but He did condemn the adultery itself, when He told her to sin no more. Pope Francis also, while upholding Church teaching against homosexuality, does not judge individual homosexuals, because the Church, while not hiding the moral inequality between virtuous and vicious traits in people, does not disingenuously promote both as equally natural to humanity itself. Excell does confuse who people are with what they do, like the Asher case judge, who treated WHAT the bakery was refusing, as the same as WHOM it was refusing it TO. She also takes cover behind Northern Ireland law which apparently gives unquestioned priority to practical convenience over moral conscience. Like the the judge, following the socialist mantra that “everything is political”, she ignores the inequality between morality and the law, whereby whether a law itself is justified, is decided by moral values and not the other way round. It is prejudice against the very existence of a private sector that then stops her from seeing NI law as showing up the endemic weakness of socialist anti-discrimination legislation in giving ‘carte blanche’ to any social majority to impose ideological uniformity on its corresponding minority.
Come off it. This was religious intolerance quite clearly. The complainants could have gone to any non-Christian bakery but they insisted on using this one. They could have just asked for a wedding cake but they demanded the bakers use a SLOGAN which they knew would be against their beliefs.
Just like in the US: "religious freedom" means MY freedom to discriminate against YOU, but get out of the way if YOU are thought to be discriminating against ME.
The "religious" word for hypocrisy is: Christian Institute.