The Small Business Column: Ashers Bakery Controversy

In this week’s column, Kehlan looks at the Ashers Bakery controversy in Northern Ireland and why it has provided a valuable lesson to businesses and business owners.

The past few weeks have been ones of profound change in Ireland, the southern half at least. Never in their wildest dreams could the yes campaign have foreseen such a landslide victory for marriage equality.

Gay rights advocate and campaigner Panty Bliss drew on the words of WB Yeats, saying “everything had changed, changed utterly”.

However, while we revelled in our ‘world’s first’ status, Ashers Bakery in Belfast was considering its appeal of a court’s decision that the act of not selling a cake to a gay couple on the grounds of religious belief was wrong.

The decision was seen as a win for gay rights in the North, while the bakery described it as “the trampling of their beliefs”.

The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell once said: ‘I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong’. Ashers Bakery is wrong.

When you deal with the public in such a manner as a bakery does, it is not up to you to choose who to serve or not. If you are allowed to do so, it provides society with a very dangerous route to go down. Just like the law itself, business cannot harvest inequality.

When you provide a service, whether in a public capacity or a private one, it is not up to you to decide on another person’s life. The law is not suppressing another’s belief, it is supressing harm to others through that belief and that can only be a good thing.

I very much doubt that had the offence involved skin colour or anti-Semitism that this discussion would even be happening. Discrimination does not have different levels nor can it be seen to have, it is the same on all levels. The law can’t favour one belief over another.

When you are in business your customers are your customers. That’s it. It is not up to you to pass judgment on their lifestyle, sexual orientation or belief.

Business people are not society’s gatekeepers. We are there to provide people, all people, with the services they require. Allowing a business to trump the law would provide us with a law that can move the goalposts on the whim of any citizen. There is a thin line between calm and chaos.

Some of the best places to work are ones which succeed in fostering tolerance. That tolerance creates a place where people want to work and where customers want to go.

It is a very important word as well. Tolerance allows everybody to believe what they want to believe, but with one crucial caveat. It accepts the differences and moves on.

As business owners, we are well entitled to our beliefs. They are not exclusive and are not better than anybody else’s.

They are not held by everybody nor should they be expected to be. We do what we do in order to better our lives and those around us.

Whether that is in the service we offer or how much money we make for ourselves or for others. Telling somebody that they don’t quite fit the bill to get your service helps none of those things.

Maybe the lesson here should be that love and tolerance have been proven to be absent.

As the writer and journalist Simon Jenkins wrote “the moral of the gay wedding cake: the law can’t create tolerance”.