The author writes: “I also wonder what the attitude of the PC brigade would be, if an Islamic owner of a bakery refused to ice an image of Muhammad on a cake.”

I don’t think this analogy works. Refusing to ice an image of Muhammad doesn’t say anything (offensive or otherwise) about the people requesting it. It is not a form of discrimination that attacks who the people, making such a strange request, are.

Similar analogies, like asking if the “PC brigade” would object to bakers refusing to ice a swastika for neo-Nazis, also don’t work because what the swastika represents is demonstrably harmful (not just an imagined affront to a non-existent being), and does not attack who a person was born as, but who they choose to be.

That being said, I’m still cautious about implementing legal mechanisms to prevent bigots exercising their intolerance when they have risked so much in starting up their own business. Furthermore, through the internet and social media, we now have an informal mechanism in place that would ensure such bigots lose business through boycotts.

If, however, their business has received tax payer money, then they would have no right to discriminate against a same-sex couples and I would feel no sympathy for them.

This is not about discrimination. Anti-discrimination laws were never meant to protect rights to a cake. It goes against the very nature of the law and it is a slap in the face to those who fought long and hard for the end to discrimination. It makes a mockery of such laws.

Being jailed for homosexuality is discrimination. Not getting the cake you want is not the same thing. It says a lot about the values of these complainants who went to all this trouble. They are petty individuals who need to use the law to bully and intimidate others over trivial issues.

Every one of us gets discriminated against every day for a host of reasons. Not all of us can retaliate by abusing a law which had much more humanity than this as its validation. Nor would most of us want to if we could.

You are all getting confused.

You can talk about what you'd like the law to be, or you can talk about whether people should have the right to use the law to uphold their rights within the law.

It seems some of you are suggesting that the law is wrong, and that's your right. However to suggest someone is wrong for upholding their right under the law is just crazy.

"However to suggest someone is wrong for upholding their right under the law is just crazy."

Laws are often much broader than the situations where they should be applied, if not then the genuinely guilty escape too easily via the fine print.

There are those who take the view that if you can get away with it then it's OK.

People can certainly be wrong for upholding a right under the law if doing so takes advantage of broadly framed laws in a way that hurts others unreasonably. Just as where free speech is free the person using that freedom to hurt others can be wrong the person using anti-discrimination laws to hurt others can be wrong.

R0bert

Cobber:

The law is not wrong but there is something very wrong with people who would pursue it to this extent over a cake. It probably cost taxpayers thousands of dollars in legal costs to hear there case. What values do they have when so much more good could be done with that money? What is important to them?

The law is neither right nor wrong but that does not mean we are not entitled to pass judgement on the values of these complainants. The law is not the only thing that society values. It also values treating others with appropriate response to a perceived wrongdoing. It values not wasting taxpayer dollars. It also values letting others have their beliefs and act upon them when they do not impinge on your own rights to any great extent.

The onus is not on them to prove to the court that they were discriminated against. The onus is on them to prove to the rest of society that a cake is so important and we should judge their values accordingly.

Not everything in society should be subject to legal values.

There are bad laws, Section 18C, for instance - such a tyrannical law against free speech, that any freedom-loving democrat might want to disobey.,The Left totalitarians who object to draconian discrimination laws being flouted, need to remember that another very bad law- conscription for death in Vietnam for some - was flouted by many young men at the urging of the very Left premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan, along with the Marxist, Jim Cairns. People who ignore history will always be caught out in their sanctimonious blathering.