Let us hope that the European human rights ruling is the end of ‘gay cake’ saga

The saga in which a bakery refused to bake a so-called ‘gay cake’ has been long and remarkable.

The episode began eight years ago when a man asked the Christian-owned Ashers Baking Co to make a cake with a slogan ‘Support Gay Marriage’.

Gareth Lee said that his human rights had been infringed and took the matter to court. He won in his first case in Belfast, a ruling that was emphatically upheld by the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal, and then — to the surprise of many observers — lost in the Supreme Court in 2018.

Now Mr Lee has lost in his attempt to get the European Court of Human Rights to overturn the UK’s highest court.

It is to be hoped, as the barrister and Evangelical Alliance director Peter Lynas says, the case is now closed for good.

The many years of court hearings in this case has involved detailed and complicated points of law that few people outside of the legal world would understand. In those circumstances, it is helpful to set aside the detail and look at the facts from the perspective of centuries of wisdom.

Same-sex marriage was almost unthinkable anywhere on earth 30 years ago, but has now been widely accepted in much of the world. That is a simple fact.

But for vast numbers of people around the globe the concept of two people of the same gender being wed to each other is upsetting, often for reasons of sincerely held religious belief or for ones of deeply embedded culture and tradition.

To most people it is self-evidently reasonable that the owners of a private business could politely decline to participate in providing a non essential service that seems to endorse a message so abhorrent to their values.

That the rights court at Strasbourg, which has often been seen as over-stepping its authority to enforce contested notions of ‘rights’, has declined to over-rule Britain seems to be part of a trend in which it is shying away from being seen as a vehicle for advancing the sort of hyper liberal politics that many reasonable people across Europe find objectionable.

——— ———

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

With the coronavirus lockdowns having had a major impact on many of our advertisers — and consequently the revenue we receive — we are more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription.

Subscribe to newsletter.co.uk and enjoy unlimited access to the best Northern Ireland and UK news and information online and on our app. With a digital subscription, you can read more than 5 articles, see fewer ads, enjoy faster load times, and get access to exclusive newsletters and content.

Visit

https://www.newsletter.co.uk/subscriptions

now to sign up.

Our journalism costs money and we rely on advertising, print and digital revenues to help to support them. By supporting us, we are able to support you in providing trusted, fact-checked content for this website.

Ben Lowry, Editor