For the second time in recent years, the Supreme Court has brought common sense to bear upon the ill-thought decisions of British governments and inferior courts.

Just as the Supreme Court struck down the SNP Government’s Named Person legislation, it has now struck down the commonly held view that homosexual activists should not be offended in any way at all.

The Supreme Court decision today that a baker is not required to promote a message with which he disagrees, far less to which he has a conscientious objection, has struck at the modern doctrine of offence.  It will liberate employers and employees alike.

The false doctrine of criminalising people for offending other people is unravelling as impractical.  Slowly, the law is identifying the error in the Macpherson Report.

The above image from the BBC website shows that the judgment has impact upon discrimination law.  This is true.  It manifests the unequal ‘equality’ laws in the UK by means of redressing the imbalance of rights.

BBC Newsnight didn’t think it was worth discussing.  I suspect that if the judgment had gone the other way, the commentators were lined up with a storyline to follow.  Instead, there was a report on sewer deaths in India, which could have been screened any time and was possibly held in reserve as a ‘fill-in’ report when needed.  Does this mean that the BBC did not know how to deal with the Supreme Court judgment in the short time available to it, or it simply wanted to ignore it as non-news?

The Supreme Court said that the Christian baker Asher’s were within their rights not to bake a cake with a message “Support Gay Marriage” iced on it.  They could not be forced to promote something that they could not support.  This has far-reaching consequences, striking at the prevailing orthodoxy, but consistent with the fundamental principles of British law.  It shows how far the pendulum had swung away from the toleration developed over centuries in Christian Britain.

The BBC news described the customer Gareth Lee as ‘a homosexual activist’.  Little has been said about why he took his cake to a Christian baker.  Was it provocative?  It has not been discussed.  However, after today’s decision Lee commented that the decision not to accept his order for a cake “made me feel like a second-class citizen and the judgment today tells me that that’s okay.”

Notice his use of feelings.  This is the weakness in the Macpherson Report’s subjective definition  of offence, and it has been milked for all it is worth, in particular by homosexual activists.  However, it has muddied the waters across the board, redefining racism, homophobia, islamophobia and antisemitism in subjective terms.  It is taking a generation to unravel the tangle into which this subjective definition has brought public life and legislation in particular.

The Newsnight newspaper review showed that the mainstream media did not report it as significant news either.  Yet consider if the Supreme Court had decided otherwise?  All mayhem would have broken out as homosexual activists would have intensified their campaigns for the shifting goalposts of secular values and against Christian values.   It would begin a turf war as each side tried to have their views promoted by their opponents. This was a critical judgment, meriting more discussion.

A BBC correspondent did not think the issue would go away.  He identified the issue as: “What is really going on inside the head of that retailer?” who exercises his right not to serve a customer.  So what?  Secularism is trying to control what is going on the head – it is called political correctness and was identified long ago by George Orwell as the Thought Police, and theologically it is the false doctrine of secular repentance.

Update:

10 Oct 2018: well done, Christian Institute and all concerned.

10 Oct 2018: Common sense from Melanie Philips as usual.

11 Oct 2018: as expected, BBC Newsnight could not bring itself to discuss the issue even the next day. Presumably they had their speakers lined up for an opposite decision.