After taking all of August off, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show returned on Tuesday with host Jon Stewart welcoming Utah Gov. Spencer Cox to the show to promote his new book on helping Americans not hate each other as much. At one point Stewart questioned Cox’s commitment to the idea when he demanded to know why Cox hasn’t forced Utahans to bake cakes for same-sex weddings even if that would violate their religious beliefs.
The context for such a question was Utah making it illegal to fire someone for being gay but maintaining First Amendment protections for people such as wedding cake bakers. For Stewart, such a compromise was not good enough, “I think that it’s certainly an admirable effort. It is hard for me not to look at it as there is a vulnerable—there is a power disparity in that equation and that the gay community in Utah is not equivalent to the Christian community in Utah.”
Stewart further claimed, “You are asking a community of people whose humanity has not been recognized as total to accept that they will be—you will still be—we can’t fire you, but we will still view you as aberrant, and we will enshrine that in the law because it does—if you flip that and you say to somebody, ‘I will not bake a cake because you believe in Jesus for your wedding,’ I think you can see that that is a contemptuous position.”
Finally getting to something resembling a question, Stewart wondered, “And so asking a group that is traditionally less righted to accept a bargain for their humanity still strikes me fundamentally as—I don’t want to say contemptible, but boy, there are some synonyms that are hard for me—it is a hard one to swallow as a victory. Does that resonate in any way?”
Cox, who was the first conservative/Republican guest on a late night comedy show in 13 months, began to reply, “I mean, it resonates, but I don’t think that that was how it was viewed, and again, You can talk to them. I’ll let them have that conversation.”
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