Stewart Enters Gay Cake Debate
2 min read
Sir Patrick Stewart was recently asked where he stands regarding the debate over whether bakeries should be compelled to make cakes for gay couples.
His answer comes as a surprise to those who are aware of his position on gay marriage, which he supports.
The Ashers Baking Company, located in Northern Ireland, recently lost a judgment and owners of the company, the McArthur family, was required to pay £500 to Gay Rights Activist Gareth Lee after refusing to make a cake for Lee with the slogan “Support Gay Marriage.”
Stewart was asked for his opinion on the matter during an interview for BBC‘s Newsnight show. “Who has the right there,” asked Evan Davis, presenter on the show. “The couple who say we want you to put ‘Yes to Gay Marriage’ on the cake, or the people who have to make the cake, who say we don’t want to put that on the cake?”
It’s a “deliciously difficult subject,” said Stewart. “It was not because this was a gay couple that they objected; it was not because they were going to be celebrating some kind of marriage or agreement between them. It was the actual words on the cake that they objected to, because they found them offensive.
“And I would support their right to say ‘no this is personally offensive to my beliefs; I will not do it’. But I feel bad for them, that it cost them £600 or whatever.”
The McArthur family has appealed the ruling.
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Bravo Mr. Stewart! If everyone who believes in gay marriage felt this way, the road to peace would be easier to find.
If you don’t want fights, why post so many articles dealing with topics you know are going to start fight? #logic
I agree with you to a point. On the other hand, we are talking about the future of how people will be allowed to live in the next 25-50 years. Regardless of which side of the debate you are on, I don’t think there is a bigger topic right now than the gay rights/religious rights debate. Too much is at stake, the very soul of Western Society, and long after the entire TOS cast is dead, this issue will still matter and the out comes will effect everyone. Hence why people are so fired up!
It should be. This is but part of the larger issues being fought over. Whose “rights” matter more?
The First Amendment says a white supremacist has the right to not make a bar mitzvah cake. That same amendment says that he can
write books criticizing the Jewish kid, maintain a blog condemning him, even set up a (peaceful) protest of the bar mitzvah while it’s going on. What he can’t do is physically harm that Jewish boy.
Weather you like it or not, hate speech is protected by The First Amendment. Why? Because one’s man hate speech is another man’s truth. The same rights that grant a Christian man to publicly condemn homosexuality a sin also allows the gay man to publicly call the Christan man a bigot.
If we start playing God now and pass laws that allow the government to decide who is spewing hate speech and who isn’t, we’ve all lost.
In the PC world, people of the same gender are no longer allowed to be friends. In fact their are no longer friends, just possible sexual prey and predators. (eye roll)
If this is the future, somebody please send me back to the past!
Every human being as it within themselves to be peaceful or to be aggressive against others. That’s factual equality right there!
So what you are saying is people who hold traditional religious views should shut up about them because to do otherwise would be hard? Imagine if the REVEREND Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t have stood up for his Christian beliefs, how things would have turned out? Imagine if Mahatma Gandi hadn’t of stood up for his Hindu beliefs, how different the world would be?
The Bible is filled with figures ranging from Noah to Daniel to Paul who were persecuted for their religious beliefs and still stood by them loudly and publicly even though it was hard. How can you or any man ask me to do less than Jesus Christ Himself?
When this whole gay rights movement started, they were horribly out numbered, and now look how things are. You saying it’s OK for them but not for me? I don’t care if I’m the last man on Earth who stands for the God of Israel, I’m not going to stand down, I’m not going to shut up, no matter what. Keep in mind that every true believing Christian feels this way, that every believing Jew, Muslim, Hindu, etc. feels this way, and there you go.
That’s debatable. Making “no law respecting an establishment of religion” could also mean not allowing religion as a defense for discrimination (or any other breach of law). But that interpretation has little chance in the only first world country where politicians kowtow to Christian fundamentalists.
You are so right. PC is the worst thing, all of a sudden we have to guard every word and every gesture because someone might feel offended. I hate this way of thinking. I want to express my opinion. Where did Freedom of Speech go?
The other day I read an article about a gay couple complaining that their street’s name is “Bangay Street” after someone called Bangay. Can people be more stupid than that?
Re your first line. No that’s not what I’m saying. . ..exactly. But if you’ve been taken to court, it makes sense to use a legitimate defence that gives you a chance of winning, even if it’s not the defence you would prefer to use, especially when that preferred defence gives you no chance of victory. By the way, if you read the judge’s judgement on the case, some of the stuff she was coming out with was so ludicrous that she was clearly so far up the backside of the gay community, if you’ll excuse the rather filthy pun, that she was never going to judge the case objectively. The classic line from her being, and I paraphrase, “the bakery discriminated against Mr Lee because it knew he was gay”. The mad woman needs to be struck off.
It’s not stated in this article, but here in Germany you can find a number of gay celebrities claiming that Ernie and Burt are a gay couple. They say the same about Spongebob and Patrick as well. For god’s sake, can’t two male persons be just friends in a non-sexual way any longer?
Worst thing is that gay people turn everything into a matter of discrimination even when there is no discrimination involved. The other day I had a discussion with a person who wanted to jump the queue in the supermarket claiming that he “only was buying two things”. I had been in that queue for about 15 minutes, and I said no, because I was not in the mood to wait even longer. All of sudden that person accused me of being against gays and that being the only reason why I wouldn’t let him pay before me.
Gays shouldn’t be wondering when one day the mood changes back against them when they keep acting like morons.
Oh my, you are a good man for posting this!
I am a gay may, and married, but I agree with Sir Patrick. I think as a society, we have lost the ability to be civil. Everything Is turning into absolutes. In a civil conversation; the bakery would say, “I am sorry, it really is not our preference to make this item; you may take your business to another location”. The requesting party would then respond with “Thank you, we shall”. Instead, all of these turn… nasty. I liken this to if you can only vegan, but a restaurant only serves cooked meat products. Do you sue the restaurant? No; you you just don’t dine there based on YOUR preference.
Now… if that bakery makes a stink about “We don’t serve your kind here” or the like, then buddy, the gloves come off.
You’ve asked a question with no definitive answer. But firstly, PS is a well known donor to the UK Labour party (Democrats for those in the US). He’s what many people would call a Champagne Socialist. He’s spent most of his acting career earning millions, he’s worth millions, he’s got a huge house in the English countryside, but because he grew up in the poor, working class (mainly socialist) north of England, he feels he has to in some way stay true to his roots (or least be seen to be trying) while being quite content to continue living it up with his millions in the bank. So, every once in a while, he’ll donate 5 figures to the Labour party, making sure he gets some column inches in the press, instead of giving it directly to the county’s under privileged where he could do some good with it. The only cause I know of him getting directly involved with is physical abuse of women, but I don’t know if he donates financially to the relevant charities.
PS believes in gay marriage. I believe you have to be pretty left of centre politically for that. Does a person’s moral and ethical stance on things like gay marriage, green issues etc form their political stance, or vice versa? I don’t know.
Many actors in the UK are fully paid up lefties to the point of being almost communist. It’s almost a pre requisite for getting an Equity card. See Martin Freeman’s twitter postings a couple of weeks before the recent UK general election as a case in point. I won’t quote his profanity filled tweets about the Conservative party.
How do you identify a lefty? Interesting question. I suppose it’s much like having gaydar. Either you can spot them coming from 100 paces, or you can’t. Or in the case of Mr Freeman, they’re a 5 1/2 foot midget tw*t with a potty mouth.
As with most groups in society who deliberately differentiate themselves from the majority in order to pursue their “rights”, the gay community is split down the middle with moderate, perfectly well balanced people, such as yourself on one side, and the activist nutjobs who are continually out to get everything they can from the heterosexual majority by all means necessary. The way I see it, the moderates need to start dealing in house with the nutjobs before things start to get really nasty.
Haha. Yeah, as great an actor as Patrick Stewart can be, the man cannot do comedy. I’m sorry, he just can’t.
Not that he had great material here to work with, but still…
You’re still alive? That’s a shame.
I agree completely.
And the reporter set them up, hoping for the kind of reaction they got.
That would be nice, but it’s not going to happen. The people most invested in this are “crusading” so logic and reason are the last thing on their small closed minds, unfortunately for the rest of us.
And the Politically Correct and their Media Crusaders think its them and if you disagree hellfire will rain down upon you!
But the crusaders are not going to be restrained on their holy mission to force everyone to accept them and do as THEY say, that would be weakness and “discrimination”.
I see what you’re saying but I have to disagree. I don’t think religious people should have to bend the truth or have to find loop holes to be able to live their beliefs. What ever happened to liberty and freedom of religion? I’m truly starting to understand what Patrick Henry meant when he said, “Give me liberty or give me death!” during the American Revolution.
It is the job of the Thought Police to uncover and punish thoughtcrime and thought-criminals. They use psychology and omnipresent surveillance (such as Television ) to search, find, monitor, and arrest members of society who could potentially challenge authority and status quo (Political Correctness).
The government (controlled entirely by the Inner Party) attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects, labelling unapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime, or crimethink in Newspeak.
A thoughtcrime is an occurrence or instance of controversial or socially unacceptable thoughts.
To entertain unacceptable thoughts is known as crimethink in Newspeak, the ideologically purified dialect of the party.
The word is also used in instances where people are prevented from
voicing opinions which are politically incorrect or which others may
potentially be offended by. This prevention may affect speech, writing,
and other forms of expression. The punishment of apostasy in sharia law
is sometimes interpreted as being the death penalty, which has been
described as a thought-crime.
“Crimestop” means to rid oneself of unwanted thoughts, i.e., thoughts that interfere with the ideology of the Party. This way, a person avoids committing thoughtcrime.
In the novel, we hear about crimestop through the eyes of protagonist Winston Smith:
“
The
mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented
itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they
called it in Newspeak.
He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself
with propositions—’the Party says the earth is flat’, ‘the party says
that ice is heavier than water’—and trained himself in not seeing or not
understanding the arguments that contradicted them.
Orwell also describes crimestop from the perspective of Emmanuel Goldstein in the book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism:
Crimestop
means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the
threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not
grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of
misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc,
and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable
of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
I don’t see it that way. The vast majority of Christians don’t “hate” gays as you put it but they don’t agree with gay marriage either. You have to realize that marriage for most Christians is a sacred institution and since homosexuality is very clearly listed as a sin in the Bible, to merge marriage with homosexuality is like taking the cross and defiling it. You don’t have to hate someone to disagree with what they do.
Also, as a side note, if someone were to go to a bakery run by a gay person and ask them to make a cake that says “Gay Marriage is a sin” or ask them to cater an event that is supporting the fight against gay marriage, I would 100% support the baker if they refused to provide the service requested. To me, liberty is more important than nearly anything else that we have in this world.
And yeah, I support a white supremacist’s right not to make a bar mitzvah cake as well as a black baker’s right to refuse a cake requested by the KKK.
Very well said.
Have you been paying attention? Christians are hardly being kowtowed to. If anything, it’s the gay community that is.
I don’t disagree with you, but in the times we’re living in now, you have to be pragmatic. We’re now in the world of Muslims who like to execute gays by dropping them head first from the top of 5 storey buildings, and who will kill anyone that’s not a paid up, card carrying reader of their lunactic religious book. “Freedom of religion” as you call it, is exactly what these SOBs are practicing. Religious freedom is the biggest can of worms going. Personally, I’d ban all organised religion. Most of it’s just a cover for child sex abuse.
Because they’re news, you know? That’s my job.
I shouldn’t have to ask people to be decent, but Internet, you know?
If you offer a service, in this case writing words on a cake with frosting, then decide not to offer based on your religious or political beliefs, that is discrimination. If you offer a service providing metropolitan mass transit (buses, for instance) and say “My personal religious belief is that blacks are inferior (because I have a flaky-pastry extrapolated theory about Genesis 9:20-27 or somesuch), and must always sit at the back of the bus, and give the better seats up front to white passengers,” do you expect to get away with that?
A service is a service. If you advertise it as “We will write words on a cake in frosting for you, but only so long as we completely agree with whatever it is you are paying us to write,” then fine. Otherwise, realise the cake and frosting are paid for, write the words, close the lid on the cake box, and get on with what passes for your life.
But generally you order the cake and pay for it when you pick it up. That means the bakery would have had to tell the couple “no” BEFORE they paid for it. If someone walks into your food-service business in the nude you can refuse to sell to them. Of course, if you don’t have a “No shirt, no shoes, no service” sign in the window, then that might be misconstrued as discrimination.
Bottom line: George Orwell likes this debate and these issues. He’s written a lot about them. George Lucas – he of the “THX 1138” mindset, does, too. “Dystopian” futures ruled by thought police.
In other words censor the news to spare peoples’ feelings? That sounds awfully liberal.
Idiotic. It is not theirs to say. Until Hensen Studios or Children’s Television Workshop say that Bert and Ernie are gay, they are not gay. Kang can jump up and down and shout that some fictional character such as Nick Fury or Justin Bieber is the biggest cockhound on the planet, but that does not magically make it so.
Kang likes licorice. Yeah, Kang said it.
No no no, hardly. Most of it is a cover for swindling, graft, and power tripping. Only some of it is a cover for child sex abuse.
The GOP has been pandering to the fundamentalist Christian right since Reagan because they’re addicted to those sweet, sweet Jesus dollars. On the other hand, the liberal side has been pandering to the gay community because it gives them a righteous cause to rally behind. It’s this year’s immigration debate.
Kang knows how to identify a lefty. Give them a pad and pen and see which hand they use to write with.
Not having the rights to use Bert and Ernie’s likenesses is also true. It is a simple choice between wanting a viable legal defense and wanting to be a martyr.
Ireland legalizing gay marriage by referendum also took place in the UK.
Icing is the last refuge for a scoundrel…seriously though, with all the talk about safe spaces…we must come to some agreement on freedom of association.
Dince much of the rather large Christian Fundamentalist community has been, essentially, forced out of its old home in the Democratic party-where Faubus, Wallace, and Byrd were KKK supporters, sometimes even members and leaders, and into the GOP, it isn’t so much pandering as reflecting its membership. Quite possibly the same is true of the Dems.
Or not.
On the other hand, I find it laughable to here some of the same voices supporting gay rights, supporting pseudo-Islaamic (yeah, Boy Georgewas at least somewhat right about Islaam being a religion of peace–but the same wss true of Christianity in 440 AD.) terrorist, since Sharia law is /very/ hostile to homosexuality….
I walk past it every week, I had no idea of their religious bent until the media picked up on it.
But then this being Northern Ireland we’re talking about, most premises that aren’t part of a big chain like Tesco are probably run by someone with particular political/religious views.
On what grounds may the shop owner refuse service? That hasn’t been elucidated in any article I’ve read.
If the customer was refusing to pay, had previously stolen from them, was making other customers leave, fine. But why decline his custom just because he wasn’t religiously conservative like the owners?
Please remember this is Northern Ireland we’re talking about, religious bigotry has been part of society here since before the state’s creation. We didn’t have culture wars as they do in the US, we had the Troubles.
Would you use the same dismissive tone about the civil rights activists in my part of the world in the 60s?
As a follow up to the “gay cake” business, a politician in local government tried to introduce a “Conscience Clause” into law that would potentially allow anyone to discriminate in the same manner as Ashers; http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-30385535.
Fair play to you.
How were they forced? They simply paid a penalty for not doing so.
I remember either Ashers or their legal team claimed that the cake wasn’t gay, so there was no discrimination.
By the same measure, how was the cake religious? I.e. (and I ask ad an atheist) where it was explicit that they were reproducing a message in exchange for money and sending the customer elsewhere wouldn’t stop the message, what were they losing out on by going ahead and printing it?
If the customer had simply asked for buns to take to the same event, iced in plain, would they still have refused, given that they’d be helping along a gay get together?
Hm. Isn’t “Trek to Libworld” one of Blish’s novels?