The most depressing thing about the Pious, I suppose, is their utter unwillingness and inability to learn anything.
We still hear, for instance, that there can be no morality without a Big Lawgiver. Oh? Plato dissected and buried that claim more than 2400-years ago, with the dialogue Euthyphro.
Now, the exact same pack of ignoramuses is reprising the repeatedly failed argument of southern segregationists back in the 60s: “My sincerely held religious belief requires that I treat blacks/gays/pubescent-girls like sewage.” Let’s not kid ourselves, either: If the Supremes accept the argument of Masterpiece Cakeshop, that argument will be revived to justify forbidding blacks to sit in Mama’s Home Cooking, to enter through the front door of the Five-and-Dime, to sit in the common area of the bus station; after all, it is logically identical.
So, too, “No Jews Allowed”, “No Muslims Allowed”, “No Mormons Allowed”, “No Scientologists Allowed”, “No Buddhists Allowed”, “Everybody But Southern Baptists Forbidden Here”.
Baptists can still be Baptists in the age of same-sex marriage. They can make fools of themselves insisting that the 1611 King James Bible is inerrant; they can dress-up for church on Sunday morning, and they can leave a Jack Chick tract for the waitress — The best tip you’ll ever get!! — afterward; they can poison their children’s minds against reason and science; they can teach them that nigras bear the mark of Cain; they can dump a gay son on the street; they can complain that sending a daughter to college to indulge her interest in astrophysics is wasteful — how would that help her raise children?; they can keep same-sex and interracial couples out of their church and their homes.
But operating Masterpiece Cakeshop is in no sense a religious activity; it is a for-profit business which operates in the public space at public sufferance. They should not be allowed to discriminate against gays any more than Mama’s Home Cooking can discriminate against blacks.