I think a lot of people either genuinely believe, or pretend to believe, that “gay” is something people do, not something people are. The way they speak, it sounds as though they don’t understand or don’t believe in the concept of homosexuality as an orientation, and think of it as a categoriation based on what behavior or lifestyle a person chooses to engage in, like “golfer” or “painter” or “vegetarian” or “serial killer.”
Which is one reason courts, especially this Supreme Court majority, have problems enforcing anti-discrimination laws based on sexual orientation rather than race. Same sex marriage was (and may in the future as this majority continues to roll back LGBTQ+ rights) so much harder for courts to grasp/enforce than interracial marriage.
Then the bigot will simply not offer “gay wedding cakes” or “gay marriage websites” while offering “straight wedding cakes” or “straight marriage websites.” At least in Masterpiece Cakeshop the court made the argument that the creative aspects of cake design created an exception that didn’t apply to off-the-shelf products. So a gay couple would/should still be able to buy a “straight wedding cake.” The 303 Creative decision however pretty much opens the doors to deny service to bespoke AND off-the-shelf products, so only “straight marriage websites” and even then, only for straight couples. So the bigots can deny customers for both the verb AND the noun. Double BS IMO.
Back to the Jewish bakery hypothetical. Hebrew/Torah cakes can be made for anyone who wants them, Jewish or not. Great, I guess, but saying no “Christian cakes” seems pretty analogous to no “gay cakes.”
Is your religion, or lack thereof, something you “do” versus something you “are”?
If being gay is something you “do” then there’s no basis for saying your religion is something you “are” because you have even more choice in the matter. Thus you can discriminate based on sexual orientation or religion (the Christian bigots are perfectly fine with that of course).
If being gay is something you “are,” and so is religion, then you can’t discriminate based on either, and if the Jewish baker makes Jewish cakes he has to make Christian cakes too, which gives me pause since that would seem to be compelled speech.
If being gay is something you “are” but religion is something you “do” then you can’t discriminate against the gay couple, but you can choose which religious cakes you’ll make. That seems the most right to me, but I’m not sure if that’s the appropriate classification for religion either.
Nobody gets any cake. 
Same-sex marriage was an extremely quick fight, accompanied by a rapid change in societal views. Same-sex marriage was only really a public issue for about twenty years, from the Hawaii case that resulted in DOMA to the Obergefell ruling that struck down all laws against it. (There were some attempts to bring it before courts before the 90s, but it was such a fringe issue that it never made it very far.)
By comparison, the Supreme Court first dealt with anti-miscegenation laws in 1883 and said they were just fine and dandy, only getting around to overturning that monstrosity in 1967.
It’s taking longer than we thought. Much longer. And it’s evidently not over.
It dawned on me that bigots aren’t a protected class. Neither is being a right wing member of the Supreme Court. So reasonable businesses could decline doing any creative business with people they believe to be bigots or certain jurists and their families. They could even share a list of such people. The “no serve bigots” equivalent of a no-fly list. Just speculating.
I think that there’s a difference between going to a baker and saying “Give me a cake with this text on it”, or “Give me a cake with this image printed on it”, on the one hand, and “Design me a cake to celebrate X” on the other. In the former case, it’s the customer’s speech. In the latter case, it’s the baker’s speech.
I can imagine a baker who specializes in wedding cakes, who does research on the people getting married, and then based on the individual people, designs a custom cake for them using their own artistic talent. If such a baker chose not to go through this custom creation process for a same-sex couple, my respect for that baker would go down, and I would probably not choose to give them my business, but I would agree that they had a legal right to do so.
On the other hand, I can imagine a kiosk in a bakery where a customer can type in whatever message they want, and select a font, and upload any image they want from a thumb drive, and the cake would be made by a completely automated process. That might require a little bit of technological advancement (I don’t know if the process of decorating a cake is completely automated yet), but it’s certainly something we’re close to. In that case, there’s clearly no violation of anyone’s rights, because the kiosk isn’t a person and isn’t exercising speech.
And even if those completely automated cake kiosks don’t quite exist yet, there are human bakers who provide essentially the same service. And if they’re providing the same service as an automated kiosk, they should have to provide it to everyone the automated kiosk does.
So a Jewish baker who runs a kosher bakery has to make a cake with a swastika on it, or write some text with something really offensive that praises the Holocaust?
Many people aren’t comfortable with the government being able to coerce that sort of conduct.
What if this baker is being asked to make a cake that’s, for all intents and purposes, identical to the cake they have no objection to making?
The only difference is the sexual preference of the person buying the cake?
What legally protected class does “Nazi” fall under?
And that’s the problem.
This court has stubbornly refused to recognize being gay as a legally protected class (even the gay marriage case relied upon the “fundamental right to marriage”, which I think is a mistake. Being gay should be considered a protected class, akin to gender).
Until they do, some people are allowed to equate homosexuality with something as distasteful as nazism.
So, the first comparison to gays that popped into your mind was Nazis and The Holocaust?
Try to guess how many people aren’t comfortable with that.
You don’t think I’m familiar with the rhetoric that seeks to justify odious discrimination?
Where I used to live, there was a kosher bakery across the street from a messianic synagogue (from my perspective, a church that is advertising itself as not a church to convert Jews to Christianity).
I have no problem saying that the kosher bakery has to sell to the church/synagogue, and maybe they do. But there could be a problem in that that most Orthodox Jews (not sure if the bakery is under orthodox supervision, but non-orthodox supervision has become unusual) have a rule against walking into a church with rare exceptions such as a royal coronation. Going into a church to make a sale is definitely not an exception. Paying a non-Jew to go into the church to make the delivery for you can also be frowned on.
I don’t know if this can be a legal principle, but I see a big difference between trying to work out a way to accommodate and saying no. So the bakery could deliver to the door of the church.
This seems like an easily solved problem. Ask the church to send someone over to pick up the cake. Or offer to deliver the cake to the home of a member.
Anyway, i don’t think a baker should be compelled to put any particular text on a cake. I think they should get to decide what words and what images they are willing to make. But if they are willing to sell a chocolate cake with white buttercream frosting decorated with candied violets¹ to a straight couple to celebrate a wedding, they should be willing to sell exactly the same cake to a gay couple celebrating a wedding.
1: that was my wedding cake
This is indeed the nub. All the various protected classes we recognize today have been explicitly enumerated in legislation, not in court cases. Yes, in may cases the courts have found other stuff discriminatory which later led to legislation catching up to the court’s findings under more nebulous grounds, typically equal protection. Now, with the court leaning hard in the rearward direction, those kinds of court-extended protections won’t occur again until a bunch of justices die of old age in 20-30 years.
The fix, and it was coming (albeit slowly) until the Reactionary Wacko Traitors took over the R party, was for federal legislation adding all forms of sexual orientation to the list of protected classes. At a stroke, the courts would be out of that business.
And so would be the orientation bigots.
Stopping the RWTs is THE central issue of the next 20-30 years of US history.
As I recall, there is a legal standard that was provided in case law regarding a protected class:
Something line “A discrete minority with a history of discrimination.”
I seem to also recall some hand wringing about whether they had to have an immutable characteristic (like race) - the problem was that religion is obviously not inherent to a person; it’s a choice, and people can presumably change it.
And so the court expanded its definition to include groups based on characteristics that are so intrinsic to a person’s identity that they can’t be expected to change.
It’s pretty obvious that sexual identity would qualify.
I’d note that the two oldest justices are Thomas (aged 75) and Alito (aged 73). Give us about a decade, and if the president is a democrat, the current 6-3 conservative court could become a 5-4 liberal majority.
Please allow me to tweak your totally true but critically incomplete statement:
Give us about a decade, and if the president is a democrat, and the Senate has a fillibuster-proof D majority, the current 6-3 conservative court could become a 5-4 liberal majority.
No filibuster on Supreme Court nominees; that went the way of the dodo on Neil Gorsuch.
You’re strictly correct. Thank you.
But without a large majority, the slightly majority party is still subject to rules subterfuge by the slightly minority party, being held hostage by swing voters (read “a la Manchin”), and a host of other maneuvers.
To govern without significant roadblocks, a party needs a significant majority in both chambers. As to SCOTUS appointments only the Senate matters. But a large majority there still is very, very helpful.
“Fillibuster-proof” is just a shorthand way of saying “significant enough to bulldoze unprincipled opposition tactics not based on the merits”.