Politics

We Regret To Inform You Australia Is Having A Very Dumb Debate About Bakers And Gay Weddings

How is this real.

by Osman Faruqi  15 November 2017
marriage equality

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The postal survey might be behind us but we’re not quite out of the woods yet when it comes to extremely weird and confusing takes on marriage equality.

One theme that keeps popping up over and over again is the bizarre idea that bakers need legal protection so they aren’t forced to bake cakes for same-sex weddings. As dumb as this sounds, it’s a real thing conservatives have been banging on about.

The No campaign have regularly brought up the spectre of Christian bakers being forced into baking gay wedding cakes during their campaign against marriage equality. Earlier this week, when it looked like the Yes side would take out the postal survey, a draft marriage equality bill from Liberal senator James Paterson included provisions that would grant bakers (along with tailors, florists and other wedding-related occupations) the right to circumvent anti-discrimination laws and refuse service to gay couples.

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It’s all very strange, especially since no one has actually been able to find a baker or florist who is demanding the right to refuse service to a couple on the basis of their sexuality. Even Attorney General George Brandis has slammed the idea, which gives you an indication of how cooked it is.

But it just won’t go away.

This morning Liberal MP Kevin Andrews, a vociferous opponent of marriage equality, tried to justify the attempted rollback of anti-discrimination laws on Sky News. It was… messy.

According to Andrews, if bakers hold a “conscientious, religious belief” against same-sex marriage they should be legally entitled to discriminate against same-sex couples. To try and justify his position he pointed to the fact that there are probably lots of other bakers who would love the opportunity to bake wedding cakes for gay couples. Which doesn’t really add up. The fact that some bakers aren’t bigots doesn’t really seem to be a strong reason to allow other bakers to discriminate on the basis of sexuality.

Ok, so even though this is an extremely dumb idea it’s nothing new. It’s what Lyle Shelton and others said during the campaign. But Andrews took things in an even weirder direction. He went on to describe a scenario in which a gay baker might want to refuse service to a heterosexual couple, or for “a Christian or Islamic celebration”, and suggested that too would be a perfectly ok thing to occur.

At this point things are starting to unravel quite quickly for Andrews, who doesn’t seem to have cottoned on to the fact that the more examples he comes up, the worse his position looks.

Sky News host David Speers then asked Andrews whether a Jewish baker (yep, we’re doing this) should be able to deny a Muslim customer. “Yep, why not?” Andrew said. “And vice versa. It has to be consistent.”

Andrews then clarified that he was talking specifically in relation to marriage, and not about all kinds of service. “We’re not talking about if somebody just comes in and says ‘David Speers I want to buy a cake’, of course there shouldn’t be any objection to that,” Andrews said.

The interview ended when Andrews confirmed he wouldn’t have a problem with a Muslim baker denying services to an interfaith couple.

Ok, let’s try and unpack what the fuck Andrews is actually trying to say amidst his Byzantine ramblings of gay bakers, straight bakers, Jewish bakers and Muslim bakers. Essentially his point is that anyone (or at least any baker) should be able to refuse service for a wedding if the couple getting married represent something that individual (or baker) conscientiously objects too. Apparently, according to Andrews, that doesn’t only extend to their sexuality but also their religion.

It’s worth reiterating that these are all entirely hypothetical scenarios. There are no bakers — straight, gay, Jewish, Muslim, or anything else — demanding the right to not bake cakes for certain couples. In fact, the Bakers Association of Australia has gone out of its way to distance itself from this “debate”, saying bluntly “What baker in their right mind would not bake someone a cake?”

Well, exactly.

So there you go. The bakers just want to bake (bake, bake, bake, bake), but conservative politicians seem intent on coming up with insanely complicated hypothetical scenarios to justify their bigotry.

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Feature image Shawn Campbell/Flickr CC.