Free Republic

Britain’s highest court on Wednesday said a Northern Irish bakery’s refusal to make a cake bearing a pro-gay slogan was not discriminatory in a ruling condemned by the customer, a gay rights activist, but hailed by the province’s main conservative party. Ashers Baking in Belfast was found guilty of discrimination in 2015 for refusing to make a cake for a customer iced with the words “Support Gay Marriage” because of the owners’ Christian beliefs. It failed in an appeal to the local courts in 2016; but the Supreme Court, the UK’s highest judicial body, overturned that decision on Wednesday, saying...

Britain is turning into a “color-coded society” as whites and ethnic minorities choose to live apart, Trevor Phillips warns today. The former head of the equalities watchdog said Britain was “in denial” about growing levels of racial division resulting from the choices different groups make about where to live. Mr. Phillips, who is now leading a research project at the think tank Demos, made his comments as he launched a study into how different ethnic groups have moved around England and Wales. …

Antidisestablishmentarianism is on the march. Which is odd, considering there is only the faintest whiff of disestablishmentarianism to fight. The Archbishop of Canterbury set this hare running with his usual confused mumbling into his beard. To disestablish the church would be "by no means the end of the world", he said bravely. He hastened to add that he did not want the church sundered from the state right now. And he would oppose "secularists [boo, hiss] trying to push religion into the private sphere". This sent the Telegraph and Mail into a spin, claiming a devilish distestablishment plot on the...