By David Harsanyi, AUGUST 14, 2015

Just in case you need a refresher: Back in 2012, a baker in the Denver suburb of Lakewood was asked by a gay couple to make them a wedding cake—two years before gay marriage was even legalized in Colorado. The owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Jack Phillips, declined to participate in Charlie Craig and David Mullins’ celebration, because such an event conflicted with his Christian faith.

Here are a few things Phillips didn’t do: He didn’t query costumers about their sexual preferences. He didn’t bar same-sex couples from purchasing a cake at a place of public accommodation. He didn’t ask consumers traveling in same-sex pairs to leave his shop. He didn’t hang a ‘No Gays Allowed’ sign in his window.

What he could never have known when he first opened his shop was the celebrating gay marriages would be a precondition for making a living. And when you consider that there are at least a few dozen other bakeries within a short drive from Masterpiece Cakeshop that could have accommodated the couple’s celebratory pastry needs, why would he?

Yet, instead of embracing a basic level tolerance or dignity, two priggish bullies decided to call the authorities when Phillips refused to bake them a cake. And the cultural commissars at Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission soon ruled that he had discriminated against the couple.

The shop was not only ordered to alter store policy and start baking cakes for gay weddings or face debilitating fines, as is often reported in the media, but it also was give comprehensive staff training and insure compliance and then file quarterly obedience reports with the government for two years describing precisely what remedial measures it had taken to conform and document why any other patrons were denied service.

So, you know, exactly how Jefferson imagined America would turn out when he was writing the Declaration of Independence.

Phillips appealed the decision, and this week, a three-panel Colorado Court of Appeals unanimously decided that Masterpiece Cake Shop’s policy against creating wedding cakes for same-sex couples was a “discriminatory and unfair practice,” and the shop will now be forced to continue to answer at the Civil Rights Commission or go out of business.

Incredibly, the court acknowledged in its decision that it would have looked at the First Amendment arguments more closely had the gay couple ordered a cake with some explicit messaging that advocated for gay marriage. In other words, the Colorado Court of Appeals believes the threshold for denying religious liberty is the presence of advocacy. In essence, the court has tasked itself with determining for you when religion should matter.

If nothing else, it’s comforting to know that Colorado can force an orthodox Islamic butcher to make pork sausages for a polyamorous bisexual bachelor/bachelorette party, as long as no one asks that butcher to promote swine and free love.

Not only does the court have the power to bore into the souls of shopkeeps to establish that religious objections aren’t authentic, at the same time it can deduce that prejudice is. It makes the risible assertion that any theological problem with gay marriage is really just “opposition” to the existence of gay Americans—whatever that means:

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http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/14/hey-...igious-freedom/