Another View: Column miscasts legal peril for religious over same-sex marriage

By Kate Boyle

M.D. Harmon has it backwards. Again. I'm talking about his Sept. 14 column in which he suggests all sorts of religious people are being criminalized for their opposition to gay marriage ("Religious groups overwhelmingly opose same-sex marriage").

Ridiculous. Let's take the wedding cake baker, for example. Assuming Harmon's facts are correct, which is doubtful, he says the Christian wedding cake baker can be sued for failing to bake a cake for the gays.

No, that's not right. The cake baker would be sued because the baker is engaged in commerce with the general public but has refused to serve a customer because the customer has different religious views.

The baker decided not to bake a cake for people he or she suspects will engage in "immoral acts" after they eat that cake. That's not criminalizing the Christian baker.

On the other hand, if the baker were engaged in the commerce of cake baking and refused to bake a cake for Christian customers, Harmon would have something to whine about.

Kate Boyle is a resident of Scarborough.

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