Gay cake ruling affirms an important right – the right to be silent
There was a noticeable outcry across social media on Wednesday when the news broke that the UK’s Supreme Court had upheld the rights of a Northern Ireland bakery who refused to make a cake decorated with the slogan “Support Gay Marriage” for a gay customer. Hard cases do indeed make bad laws and that would certainly have applied here if the court had followed the public’s mood. It was also a shame that people weren’t as relieved as they perhaps should have been (one notable and fine exception being Gavin Rice’s excellent summary here at Reaction).
Yet it is easy to understand the confusion. The ruling seemed to affirm a bigotry and that was indeed unfortunate. Look beyond this rather narrow interpretation and you might begin to see how the case echoes a problem that’s much larger than mere decorative icing. This is about a right that is routinely misrepresented. It is a right that is, in every way, as important as the right to free speech. This is about the right to silence.
Silence is not something you might instinctively wish to champion in the way that you would wish to champion speech. Silence can be as much a form of speech as passivity can be a form of action. Many are the instances where the right not to act is as important as the right to act. The most commonplace example is the right we all assert when we refuse to listen or read something that offends us. It’s also the right to stop using a product or service that we’ve decided is antithetical to our values. You might think it trivial if one group of people decide to stop buying a certain newspaper or if a newsagent decides to stop stocking it but that does not mean that those people or that newsagent should not have that right.
It is a common misnomer, inherited from the radical left to whom all truths have become relative, that we must listen to the other points of view. That is as profoundly wrong as it is inherently counterproductive. There is no hubris in arguing that 21st-century medical knowledge is better than 14th-century quackery. People certainly have the right to lick toads if they think it will do them some good but the rest of us shouldn’t be forced to keep a supply of lickable toads in our medicine boxes in case of a sudden outbreak of boils.
Many who object to the ruling only considered it in the narrowest sense, feeling understandable sympathy for Gareth Lee, the gay rights activist who ordered the cake. But what about the alternative? This, after all, wasn’t just about a Christian baker refusing to make a cake with a pro-gay message. It was about, in the future, some gay baker being compelled to make cakes expressing something they felt objectionable. It is about the publican forced to accept bookings from the local temperance movement and having to advertise their meetings on the event board. It is about the university made to open its doors to holocaust deniers and flat-earthers. It is the right of a body of astrologers forced to invite a learned astrophysicist or the right of creationists made to sit through a lecture by a Darwinian.
The right to free speech is not the same as the right to be heard and this ruling defends our right to not participate in something that we individually hold to be objectionable. For that, the court should have the grateful thanks of anybody who really does cherish individual freedom.