Baking Liberty of Conscience into the Cake: A marriage controversy causes anger in Ireland

Atheists and homosexual-rights activists in Ireland are threatening protest marches. A local government in the overwhelmingly Catholic country has fined a homosexual baker in the village of Inch (County Clare) for refusing to produce a wedding cake featuring, on its icing, the inscription, “A man shall . . . hold fast to his wife — Gen. 2:24.”  The baker, Robert O’Riordan, says that he considers the inscription to be an implicit rebuke of his own domestic living arrangement and an imposition on his right as an atheist to refuse assent to “any material endorsement of religious ceremonies.” Mr. O’Riordan regularly bakes other wedding cakes; the difference here, he says, is that the inscription requires him to acknowledge the specifically religious nature of the nuptials, thus infringing on his freedom of conscience.

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