At CNSNews, Fr. Marcel Guarnizo offers a wide-ranging essay on the issues in play concerning businesses being strong-armed into participating in “gay wedding” ceremonies. Some salient excerpts:

The “homosexual cake,” is not just a cake, it is an ideological statement, and here the vendor must decide if he wants to engage or participate in an ideological statement. If the “gay couple,” wants a generic cake, by all means, it should be sold. But the wedding cake they seek is involving a free citizen and a business in making a political or ideological statement, and here the vendor must weigh questions of conscience and opportunity cost. Does the entrepreneur want to be involved in these questions?

Political statements and questions of conscience are clearly within his right to decide. He may want to protect his brand and his corporate ethos, and these considerations will come into play in his decision. He is not obliged to make a “Republican cake,” or a “Democrat cake,” either.

What should prevail here is the freedom of conscience (cultural freedom) and the protection of economic freedom to transact business with a costumer or not. All participants in a free market, both client and vendor, have the freedom of carrying out business or refusing a transaction. The opportunity cost of lost profits, is the freedom of choice necessary in the case of non-necessary services.

The issue here is that the specific kind of intellectual and ideological participation in cakes and weddings is quite different than the services a hospital, restaurant or airline performs. In these, there is no ideological participation, mostly because they are dealing with matters of the body (material transactions which do not involve values or beliefs, non-intellectual); the restaurant feeds you the same food everyone else gets, and the body is quite non-ideological. The plane moves you from one spot to the other. The hospital helps to heal you, and disease is quite non-ideological. There is no sufficient reason in these cases to refuse the service, but the provider is in no way being coerced to participate in your ideology or objectionable activities (from their point of view). A fire is a fire to a fireman. There are no gay fires or heterosexual fires, just flames. Clearly, providing electricity and water supply to a citizen is necessary and does not involve anything but a material transaction.

[…]

Since December of 2014, California, the District of Columbia and New Jersey have banned psychological therapy to transgender youth and others. Whatever happened to patient rights? Whatever happened to affording people the ability to avail themselves of services if they so choose?

In these states, and the homosexual lobby clearly wants this to be a national ban, psychologists and counselors are forbidden by law to intervene in sexual orientation matters with transgender minors. In a nation where even dogs and cats can have specialists assist them in their behavior and difficulties, young people today are denied services, in utter disregard for patients’ rights and the desire of parents for a consultation. Who then is denying services to whom?

Fr. Guarnizo knows a little something about the coercive agenda of radical homosexuals. If you didn’t recognize his name, he is the priest who made headlines in 2012 after refusing to give communion to the daughter of the deceased at a Washington, DC funeral – after that woman revealed to him that she was in an active homosexual relationship. (Other, similar cases in the DC-area followed.)

For his fidelity to his vocation and the preservation of the Most Holy Eucharist from sacrilege, the Archdiocese of Washington summarily removed his faculties to act as a priest in the Archdiocese. This is a preview, I’m afraid, of what we may expect to happen to faithful priests in a post-synodal world where the divorced and remarried will feel entitled to present themselves for communion.

Society is clearly moving us in this direction so quickly that the Church’s position, if not stated forcefully and universally, will be little more than a forgotten footnote of history. The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments today on the question of whether same-sex “marriage” is a Constitutional right, and whether states that have forbidden it have to honor same-sex “marriages” contracted in one of the 36 — yes, thirty six — states that have now allowed them. Associated Press SCOTUS reporter Mark Sherman offers this summary of what’s on the table:

If you didn’t catch my podcast yesterday, entitled “Sodom’s Revenge,” you may want to give it a listen. This is an issue that is moving with breathtaking speed and aggression, and the moral law and right reason are being trampled underfoot on the way.