Remember Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who declined to bake a cake for a gay wedding reception, citing his religious convictions?

Phillips made it clear to the two men that he would be happy sell them other baked goods but that he just didn't feel right preparing a cake for their wedding reception.

The latest on this story is that an appeals court in Colorado has ruled that Phillips' religious reservations did not give him the right to refuse to bake the wedding cake. 

Or as Wonkette puts it in a felicitous headline: "Another Court Tells Gay-Hatin' Baker to Suck a Cake Froster."

Who's hatin' now?

Wonkette continues:

The Colorado Court of Appeals has given another homophobe cake baker the gift of martyrdom and however many virgins fundamentalist Christian assholes get when they eat dirt and die. Oh no, the judges didn’t LITERALLY kill the baker, they just wrote a real mean ruling what says that Jack Phillips, owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, did bad discrimination when he refused to put some of his world famous frosting on a gay cake, in a gay way, for a gay-marrying couple, and now he must REPENT!

Yeah, this is the level of public discussion nowadays.

David Harsanyi describes the case a little differently over at The Federalist:

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 that 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 exhibiting a basic level of 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 ruling against Phillips is just one more example of the increasingly frequent attacks on religious liberty we are seeing. In the past, Americans could feel proud that our government does not force us to do things that violate our consciences.

Harsanyi concludes:   

All of this is not to say that in American life the minority should never be compelled to surrender to some form of majoritarianism, judicial force, or government. In this case, though, the minority does not have the ability to compromise without abandoning its faith. The other side refuses to compromise exactly because of this reality. And courts and commissions around the country are willing to destroy businesses—businesses that sometimes took a large part of a lifetime to build—by ignoring one of the most vital functions of the First Amendment.

The position of these businesspeople, unlike Southern racists decades ago, in no way undermines the newfound right of gay Americans to marry, nor does it inhibit them from enjoying freedom or finding happiness. In this case, only one side is attempting to legislate morality.

If you admit—and most rational people, even if those who quarrel with the reasoning behind religious obstinacy, do—that millions of Christians hold some form of genuine, long-standing religious conviction that prohibits them from celebrating gay marriage, but still support state coercion, you might as well admit that religious freedom isn’t compatible with your conception of a contemporary society.

A different kind of administration might slow down the attacks on religious liberty, but this is likely to play out inthe courts, and in a media environment where the viciousness we saw in Wonkette is common if usually held in check for the sake of appearances.