A number of state legislatures have been debating laws that would protect businesses that decline to provide wedding-related services for same-sex ceremonies. We are seeing lawsuits spring up when bakers, florists, or photographers decide not to provide their services because they object on religious grounds.

Most Americans follow a philosophy of “live and let live.” These live and let live laws are merely an attempt to say that no vendor should be compelled to provide a service if they have moral or religious objections.

The editors of National Review put it this way. “Live-and-let-live is a creed that the gay lobby specifically rejects: The owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado was threatened with a year in jail for declining to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. New Mexico photographer Elaine Huguenin was similarly threatened for declining to photograph a same-sex wedding. It is worth noting that neither the baker nor the photographer categorically refuses services to homosexuals; birthday cakes and portrait photography were both on the menu.”

The editors conclude that homosexuals have not been well served by their leadership who want to make religious conviction a crime. They also have not been served well by the media. Some commentators call these “homosexual Jim Crow laws” and others say such laws are “a license to discriminate.” The National Review editors lament that commentators today are trying to make it seem like trying to “find a gay friendly wedding planner” is the “moral equivalent of having spent centuries in slavery and systematic oppression under Jim Crow.”

Let’s be honest. I think it unlikely that these religious bakers, florists, and photographers were chosen at random. They were targeted in order to advance the gay agenda and to send a message that you dare not cross the homosexual lobby. Do so and you will be fined and sued. Most of us are fine with a live and let live philosophy of life. Sadly many gay activists and many in the media elite are not.