So say an engaged couple, a man and a woman, enter a cake shop and order up a wedding cake. When asked by the clerk where to send the bill, the woman says:

"We live at the following address," writing it down on the invoice.

"We?" the clerk says. "You both live there? Together?"

"The two of us, yes," the man says.

A hard look comes over the clerk's face.

"I'm very sorry," he says. "But due to my religious convictions, I can't in good conscience sell a wedding cake to a couple living in sin. I'm afraid you'll have to take your business elsewhere."

The couple are stunned, too stunned to really even get mad, and so they leave.

"That was weird," the man says.

"It was," the woman agrees, then says "Hey, look. There's another bakery."

It may seem as though this story is meant to convey a "meh" response to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, but I actually mean the very opposite. Because I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the story I just told has probably never happened in real life. At least not lately or often enough for anyone to notice. Which is my point.

The religious conviction that premarital sex is wrong is certainly real, but at this point in time it isn't a conviction that anyone can really carry with them into public life the way they seem to want to with scriptural homophobia. A business that only is willing to serve virgins and married people simply won't make it very far. For that matter, a consumer that refuses to frequent any business that is operated by or employs "fornicators" won't make it very far. And complaining that their children's public school teacher has a live-in girlfriend isn't likely to be taken seriously either. Basically, if the sanctity of marriage means chastity before the exchanging of rings, the world has very definitely decided to move past your hangup.

That said, I see how the story I just told could certainly be held up as part of a rhetorical argument in favor of these Religious Freedom Restoration Acts.

"See, it's not just about gay people," a proponent might say. "We reserve the right to refuse service to sinful straight people too! It's about religious conviction, after all."

And they'd be right, except for the part where the story doesn't -and basically cannot- actually happen in reality. Merchants of religious conviction are finished messing with the rights of straight couples (unless those couples happen to be interracial, in which case, not quite) and have moved on to same-sex couples.

Which is precisely why the law shouldn't be on their side here. The point of anti-discrimination law is not to explicate the terms of every interaction a merchant has with every potential customer. That would be micromanagement. No, in this context, the point is to make sure that same-sex couples are protected against the same discrimination that straight couples *need no protection against*.

The Koran (which I have read and studied thoroughly) and (which all muslims align themselves with), contains 109 verses commanding hate, murder and terror against all human beings who refuse to submit or convert to Islam.

My life has been threatened repeatedly by muslims in response to my publication of those verses from their Koran. Why would I want to rent or sell a gun and hand ammunition to someone who aligns himself with a religion that commands him to kill me?

And second, we have this category of “our Christian values” that appears to be, on closer inspection, devoid of content and substance. It’s an ornate treasure chest with nothing inside.
It’s a very busy sort of nothing — forms of prayer and worship and scripted piety and institutional inertia and lots and lots of worrying about what everyone’s genitals might be up to. But it’s all fruitless. It’s fruitless by design — prevented and restricted from bearing any meaningful fruit other than producing more of the same busy nothingness. It’s abstract — abstracted from “doing a lot to help” orphans and widows and refugees, and thus, itself, helpless.
Such “Christian values” cannot be protected. There’s nothing there to protect.