On the day that the UK Supreme Court issued its judgment in the now famous “gay cake” case, I wrote that, in my view, the judgment was wrong on legal grounds.
I believe that the Supreme Court has misinterpreted the scope and purpose of UK law and, in doing so, deprived people of a level of protection against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation that the law was designed to guarantee them.
Since the judgment, I’ve been genuinely astonished by the level of support that it has received from people with widely different views. Although my principle reason for believing that the Supreme Court judgment is wrong is based on legal grounds (my reasoning is outlined here) I offer some further general thoughts below on the judgment in the context of the wider public debate.
Remember your history
The late, great James Baldwin – for many, a gay hero – said:
“History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”
Yet, in the public debate on the “g…