to have called my mother ignorant and uneducated?

[NomiMalone]

And have told her that her offensive views are not welcome in my home?

They only arrived this morning FFS.

Subject came up of the bakery in N.I. (where we're from) that refused to make a cake that had a pro-gay marriage slogan.

According to my mother the bakery were in the right. Being gay is a choice, most gay people are just saying they are for attention and it's completely unnatural.

WIBU to lose it with her?

OP's mum is only three years older than my DP, who used to hang out in Madame Jojo's and is the coolest person I know.

I know plenty of homophobic dickheads in their thirties and younger, though.

Age has nowt to do with it. Ignorance has, though.

As they were conducting a business for profit they had to comply with the law notwithstanding their personal religious views.

In which case (and again, to be clear, I think that the bakers are in the wrong here) I think that's a worrying precedent. Common carrier provisions are quite rare and usually associated with monopolies or near-monopolies. So the Post Office, and the railways, aren't allowed to ask to check what's printed on the pile of paper you are want shipped from A to B or, more generally, aren't allowed to discriminate between classes of goods.

A judgement which said that, say, a theatre that rents out its premises to visiting companies can't refuse to rent to a holocaust denier, or a print shop can't refuse to publish copies of Mein Kampf, I would say was quite a worrying extension of free speech principles. Free speech says the government cannot stop me from speaking, it does not say that you have to provide me with a platform or a megaphone. I don't think the judgement does say that, and it would be very interesting to sketch out exactly what it does say.

No, it isn't a worrying precedent, it's something that has been enshrined in statute law since the first Race Relations Act in the 1960s.

A theatre is perfectly entitled to refuse to rent to a holocaust denier, because being a holocaust denier is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. The same applies to being a publisher of Mein Kampf. Therefore if I ran a bookshop I would be perfectly free to refuse to stock it, whether I did so because I objected to its contents or because I thought it wouldn't sell.

We have as a country recognised for a very long time that free speech isn't absolute, and that there have to be controls either to prevent defamation or to prevent discrimination within very tightly prescribed parameters. In this case in fact free speech wasn't involved at all: action was not taken against the bakers for anything they wrote or said, but because they were discriminating in the provision of services.

A theatre is perfectly entitled to refuse to rent to a holocaust denier, because being a holocaust denier is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act.

Being a gay marriage advocate isn't a protected characteristic, either. The link was from there to being gay, which is.

Being Iranian is a protected characteristic, and holocaust denial is official policy of the Iranian government and is taught in Iranian schools. If you turn away the Iranian holocaust denier because of the holocaust denial, are you risking prosecution for turning someone on the grounds of a protected characteristic? Is the link from supporting same-sex marriage (not protected) to being gay (protected) qualitatively different from the link from holocaust denial (not protected) to being Iranian (protected).

Obviously, we weren't in the court, didn't see the witnesses, etc, etc.

Somebody's quibbling for the sake of being a quibbly person...

namechange, look at the judgment if you want to query the rationale behind it.

If you turn away the Iranian holocaust denier because of the holocaust denial, manifestly it is not because he is Iranian. Iranian government policy does not mean that Iranian citizens are compelled actively to promote holocaust denial in other countries.

Another one from N. Ireland here. Reminds me of many moons ago, my uncle was spouting off at the dinner table about how gays should be put up against the wall and shot. There was I imagining some very kind and dear friends of mine up against the wall but I wouldn't have said anything except my young cousin was there and I wanted her to hear a different point of view. Unfortunately my grandmother who was dosing at the table woke up, heard what I said and started into a tirade about Sodom and Gomorrah, narrow-minded Calvinist that she was.

Iranian government policy does not mean that Iranian citizens are compelled actively to promote holocaust denial in other countries.

Being gay doesn't mean that gay people are compelled actively to promote (loving the avoidance of the split infinitive there) gay marriage, either.

It's easy to stand up for judgements when the right guys won, as in this case. I'm worried about the basic premise that it's now risky to refuse a service if there is a link from the service to a protected characteristic that you may not even know about (from what I've read, the order was accepted by the initial staff member but rejected later in back office after the complainant had left, so it's not at all obvious that they knew he was gay).