Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, defends his stance on gay marriage wedding cakes
(9News)


In the last year I was appalled to see how something as simple as baking a cake has become another front in the nation’s ever deepening culture wars.

What’s next St. Patrick’s Day banned because St. Patrick wore a dress-like garment?

You may have heard about the gay couple that ordered a wedding cake recently in Denver and were told by the bakery that they wouldn’t serve ‘their kind’ over their deep religious objections.

What you may not have heard is that the same Colorado bakery was approached to bake a wedding cake for two dogs and they did so without a qualm. So was it deep religious objections or just an old fashioned deep dislike of gay people?

I mean what could be gayer than a wedding cake? Airy sponge and silver bows and layers of frosting with cute little figurines on top? Are you kidding me? Have you ever heard Donna Summer sing MacArthur Park?

What is going on in this society that one hard-hearted section of the public are now making literally everything we celebrate, from Christmas to Halloween to Saint Patrick’s day, into a giant opportunity to bash anyone they don’t like?

What has made people so mean that they even pick wedding cakes as an opportunity to inform their neighbors that they’re going to hell?

Last week in Colorado a judge ruled that the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver would face fines if it continued to turn away paying gay customers who want to buy wedding cakes there.

The shop owner Jack Phillips had argued that making cakes for gay weddings violated his Christian beliefs. That’s why when David Mullins and his partner Charlie Craig went to Phillips shop in 2012 he refused point blank to bake it for them.

Mullins called the experience of being denied service at the bakery offensive and dehumanizing. I’m sure it was. No one wants to be told they’re a special breed of untouchables on a fast track to Satan’s fires. I mean, come on.

“No one should fear being turned away from a public business because of who they are,” Mullins said.

He has a point. To be clear I don’t have a problem with a person objecting to gay marriage. But I do have a problem with a for-profit public business objecting to it. Because baking a cake for one person and not another is discrimination. There are state laws against that.

Phillips runs a cake shop, not a philosophy department or a divinity school. If he doesn't like sections of the buying American public or indeed his home state’s non-discrimination laws, he can move himself and his bakery to a theocracy like Afghanistan where his brand of unevenly distributed intolerant fundamentalism is tediously commonplace.

But here in the United States you can’t deny people services for being gay any more than you can for being black or Jewish, or Irish come to that.

We went through this back in the 1960’s. You’d think that people would remember.