I feel the need to write something about the story just being reported on the bbc news channel. A judge has ruled against a bakery in northern Ireland that refused to make a cake celebrating gay marriage, ordering them to pay £500 damages. It was of course the right ruling: the bakery was obviously discriminating against the couple who ordered the cake. What angers me, though, is the way in which the bakery family try to justify their actions on religious grounds: they have the affront to claim that because their faith prohibits gay marriage, they had a right to refuse to bake the cake. They even go as far as to present themselves as the victims. I’m sorry, but this pisses me off: discrimination is discrimination, and faith is no excuse. Hiding behind a fiction does not make prejudice any less abhorrent. Part of me says people choose to believe in something in order to justify their hatred. After all, sexuality is innate – it cannot be chosen or relinquished at will; religion can. Thus the argument that one form of equality (the freedom to express sexuality) must be weighed against another (freedom of religion) does not wash, as sexuality must outweigh religion. Faith is chosen; it is a set of stories one can choose to believe in or not. And one can choose how to use it: for these bakery people to use it to justify discrimination and then to accuse others of discriminating against them on religious grounds really pisses me off.