A leading Jewish academic in Britain has expressed his dismay at the persecution aimed at Christians there for their opposition to gay marriage.
Writing in The Jewish Chronicle in the wake of the judgement handed down against Ashers Bakery in Belfast in the so-called ‘gay cake case’, Professor Geoffrey Alderman states: “Over the past year I have watched in horror as practising Christians in the UK have been persecuted (there is no other word for it) because of their principled opposition to ‘gay marriage’.”
On the Ashers case, Prof. Alderman, who is professor of modern history at the University of Buckingham,suggests that religious discrimination had a role in the judgement against the bakery owners who refused a request from gay advocate Gareth Lee to bake a cake supportive of same-sex marriage.
“No matter how learned in the law are those lawyers who have tried to insist that [Judge] Brownlie’s ruling had nothing to do with religious discrimination against the Asher family,” he writes, “because the judge had determined that the company was merely a business (and could not, therefore, claim the protection the law affords to religious institutions), the verdict in this case has all the hallmarks of religious persecution.”
Warning that “British Jews need to pay attention to what has happened”, Prof. Alderman writes: “sooner or later British Jews will be targeted…Suppose Mr Lee had approached any one of these outlets and demanded the baking of a cake iced with a slogan advocating “gay marriage”.
Criticising Britain’s same-sex marriage legislation as doing nothing to “protect the wider freedom of religious conscience, Prof. Alderman accuses the gay marriage campaign of using “any opportunity to chip away at this freedom and thus advance its own agenda”. “In a liberal democracy the right to live one’s life in accordance with deeply held, non-violent beliefs needs to be protected – whether or not you or I happen to agree with them.”
