THE culture wars continue. Cakes are back in the frame.
Rather like intended consequences and those sometimes tragic alternatives, unintended consequences, I have been looking for the opposite of the old computing term WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), usually pronounced ‘wizzywig’.
The best I can do is to put an ‘n’ in so that it becomes WYSINWIG, wizzynwig, standing for ‘what you see is not what you get’.
Cake baking has been a dangerous economic sport recently. Gay customers have taken to testing out their civil rights by targeting Christian bakers by asking to have cakes made for their weddings with enthusiastic gay slogans on top.
It’s not that they couldn’t get these colourful cakes made elsewhere. They wanted to test the idea of whether or not a baker who is a Christian, and quaintly still believes in 3,000 years of religious experience and practice has a legally protected conscience or not.
In the UK the Northern Ireland bakers ‘Ashers’ are waiting for the Supreme Court to release its decision on their appeal, which is not about whom they serve (it’s agreed they serve everyone without discrimination) but what they bake; ie, the slogans on the cake.
I don’t know how many Muslims bake for a living. But neither the gay community nor anyone else have yet to try out the legal position on getting a Muslim baker to create a cake iced with one of those troublesome Danish cartoons of Mohammed with a bomb-shaped turban in the name of diversity.
But that’s because it’s not really about bakers and cakes, because the present culture wars are about sex, gender and what constitutes a family.
The three-card trick that’s being played on us is that diversity and inclusion actually mean what they say. But they don’t. ‘Diversity’ doesn’t include those who believe marriage is between men and women, and ‘inclusivity’ excludes them. But using those words means that anyone who disagrees with them can be presented as ‘bigoted’.
How does this work out?
A recent example of diversity and inclusion in action would be the Christian wedding shop in Bloomberg, Pennsylvania. A group of LGBT activists descended on this small town inviting all the shop owners to display LBGT rainbow flags in their windows in support of ‘diversity’. Those that didn’t were identified and targeted. The local Christian wedding shop didn’t.
Shannon Kennedy and Julie Ann Samanas, a committed lesbian couple, entered the shop and asked the Christian wedding shop owner, Victoria Miller, to make their wedding dresses. When they were told the shop only catered for traditional weddings, the result was a large-scale campaign of harassment. The harassment included hundreds of hate-filled and fuelled emails and phone calls a week. (They could have and did get their dresses made elsewhere.)
The shop folded under the pressure of this ‘diversity and inclusivity’ initiative, and the six staff lost their jobs.
But the inclusion doesn’t just stretch to bakers and wedding dress makers. More locally, Ofsted have been accused of targeting traditional Jewish and Christian schools and pulling the children before a small inquisition to test them on whether they have been ‘officially taught’ about gay marriage, and on their answers hang the success or otherwise of the inspection.
So this is a case of WYSINWYG, what you see is not what you get. You are promised liberal inclusivity, but what you get is censorship imposed and freedom of choice removed.
Freedom of conscience is a very precious thing; and it is personal. You don’t impose it on anyone else; it’s just for you. You don’t campaign to stop happy gay couples getting the cakes that help them celebrate; you will even bake them the cakes, just not write the slogans.
Some people are pacifists, for example. Christian pacifists think that all war is wrong. (Not all Christians agree with them.) If they were in commerce, they might not want to use their skills to glorify armed conflict. They don’t stop others doing it, just refrain themselves.
If you wanted a military uniform you might not choose a pacifist tailor. There are lots of tailors. If you wanted a cake celebrating a famous military victory for a historical re-enactment party, you might not choose to try to make a pacifist baker make the slogan on the cake. There are lots of bakers who will do it for you. You are not harmed by their conscience, unless you choose to be.
This week, the American Supreme Court ruled in favour of a Christian baker in Colorado who was closed down by the Human Rights Commission when he declined to make and, more importantly, ice a cake. They ruled that ‘the Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility towards the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection’.
The law both there and here already rightly protects gay and other people from discrimination against them personally. The American Supreme Court has decided that diversity and inclusion ought to include one’s conscience.
Let’s see if the UK Supreme Court can manage that step towards real diversity and inclusion for the bakers from Northern Ireland.
