In 2014, when he walked into a small Belfast bakery, Gareth Lee must have felt fury and frustration at Northern Ireland’s sclerotic government. As same-sex couples in the rest of the UK were planning joyous weddings, vote after vote at Stormont denied him the same right. Here political hostility to gay marriage was fuelled by religious doctrine and the devolved system was barricaded against change. (A year later, a vote would narrowly pass only to be vetoed by the DUP.) And when Lee asked Ashers bakery, named after Genesis 49:20 — “Bread from Asher shall be rich, and he shall yield royal dainties” — to ice the slogan “support gay marriage”, it appeared to have been

Source: The Times January 08, 2022 10:30 UTC