This sqawking about 'religious bigots' by people who themselves are bigots is a joke.

Operating a public service means you serve the public! Yes they could withhold part of their service if it goes against so called Christian (homophobic) principles?

But suppose that service had been a medical clinic?

Every day Ambos are supposed to treat druggies, alcoholics and people out of their brains and violent for no particular reason!

Suppose treating druggies went against some so called religious belief/conviction?

Medical treatment can be the iced version or just plain cake as it were! And germane to the thread or topic!

And suppose we just gave the iced version to people not thought to be Gay?

I can remember being treated daily for multiple PE's in a regional hospital, and found myself the recipient of this lessor style of medical treatment; at the hands of a particularly large male nurse/homophobe.

Eventually a doctor came to see me, and discovered the black and blue bruising that shouldn't have been there!

What I'm saying, if you sign up for a particular job or vocation, provide the best service you're capable of, regardless of who you're serving!

I made a point of showing said knuckle dragging Neanderthal, (nurse Asher)a photo of the wife and kids as I was leaving; just so I could watch him squirm and get all red and flustered; particularly when I said to him, can't judge a book by its cover eh?

And had I been alb,e to stand he would have received clicked heels and a stiff arm salute! Ditto Asher's village cake shoppe!

And while the next hospital was better with the hands on stuff, a chest infection was knowingly left untreated, and I was cross infected with another patients, almost impossible to cure, tropical ulcer!

I guess you could say there was no icing on that particular cake, and or, homophobia is alive and well in the bush; and all to often on the back of no evidence, just patent homophobic paranoia!

And you can still find similar versions of Gay bashing in the bush; and often only because you disagree with this attitude/medieval belief!
Rhrosty.

ttbn, it was Daniel McArthur who turned the issue into a 'religious' one two days after Mr. Lee's order was accepted and paid in full and it was Asher's who should be held to account for the costs of litigation which could have been avoided... this from the Belfast Telegraph:

"The Equality Commission, which has a statutory obligation to monitor compliance with equality laws in Northern Ireland, had initially asked for the bakery on Belfast's Royal Avenue to acknowledge it had breached legislation and offer "modest" damages to the customer.

When Ashers refused, the commission, a publicly funded watchdog, proceeded with the legal action."

I agree that in the scheme of things this issue is a trivial one and should have been treated as such by Asher's.

WmTrevor:

What difference does it make that the order was accepted and paid for. Are Asher’s before the Commission for failure to supply what was ordered or for discrimination? Had they discriminated within seconds or within weeks the outcome would be the same and Lee would have raised the issue with the Commission. It was Lee who brought the issue to attention. He got his money back and they failed to deliver. That happens every day in business. If it was that important he could have gone to the Commissioner for sloppy business.

He was not concerned about the cake but about making an example of someone who has a problem with his sexuality. By making a discrimination issue out of it instead of a business issue he has shown his insecurity when people have a problem with his sexuality.

Yuyutsu, you miss completely the context of Dawkins – it’s all analogy. They are not real parameters. Genes do not think, do not care, cannot actually be selfish or choose a body. It is artful storytelling explaining to lay people the effects of natural selection using human characteristics you understand.

In genetics we mostly avoided talking this wrong way around from reality. Natural selection works on genes not the other way around. The 'gene' in pop genetics is unreal because it’s mutations not different genes that compete. It's not individualistic either as evolution is the sum of the population. "It is in the interest of those genes" is an exceedingly simple construct to explain the complexity of natural selection 'selecting' or 'promoting' gene types through greater reproductive success of their conferred biology. It is an absolutely passive process but we understand best purpose and taking action.

"Peace and harmony will only come when we stop to define ourselves in terms of our genes in general and their sexual-inducements in particular."
We have barely started. With your artistic impression of genetics, I think you refer to genetic falsehoods, like the exaggerated difference we put on male-female, between races and between humans and other animals when the genetics and biology isn't that diverse. If we truly defined ourselves genetically or more correctly biologically, we wouldn't have races, we wouldn't limit the role of women and we would accept all our attributes have biological diversity.

Our 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act were a world first for national recognition of intersex people but it’s inconsistent at state level. Extremely mean discrimination in denial of human biology, of sex biology generally. The State still considers our homosexuality and transgender as an optional add-on culture when we LGBTI really want to be treated as are heterosexuals, that our biology is correct and moral.

Test the stupidity: would a religious cult get far that demonised the ranga phenotype? Try intersex instead of gay on top of the cake. The dilemmas and the great difficulties exist only because we avoid clarity and exalt culture over biology.

Eric G wrote: "Try intersex instead of gay on top of the cake."

A visit to http://crl.ucsd.edu/~elman/Courses/HDP1/2000/LectureNotes/williams.pdf might be enlightening.

From that site: "Many Native Americans also understood that gender roles have to do with more than just biological sex. The standard Western view that one's sex is always a certainty, and that one's gender identity and sex role always conform to one's morphological sex is a view that dies hard. Western thought is typified by such dichotomies of groups perceived to be mutually exclusive: male and female, black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. Clearly, the world is not so simple; such clear divisions are not always realistic. Most American Indian worldviews generally are much more
accepting of the ambiguities of life. Acceptance of gender variation in the berdache tradition is typical of many native cultures' approach to life in general."

The site is fascinating.