Erick Erickson has also noticed John Kasich’s remarkably arrogant dismissal of the Christian florists, bakers, and photographers who do not put their talents in the service of a gay weddings and who are losing their livelihoods and pensions as a direct result of government fines, penalties and other coercions:

This week, presidential candidate and Governor of Ohio John Kasich answered with this cynical retort to the question of whether bakers, photographers, and florists with religious objections to same-sex marriage should have their religious liberty trampled upon by the government:

I think frankly, our churches should not be forced to do anything that’s not consistent with them. But if you’re a cupcake maker and somebody wants a cupcake, make them a cupcake. Let’s not have a big lawsuit or argument over all this stuff — move on. The next thing, you know, they might be saying, if you’re divorced you shouldn’t get a cupcake.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow could have given an answer like that.

Kasich’s comments are all the more baffling considering that he identifies himself as a Christian. He pleads empathy on the trail for the downtrodden and dispossessed. But on this, Governor Kasich forsakes his Christian brothers and sisters at a time when every sector of culture is colluding against them.

All of these people would be and were happy to bake cupcakes or design beautiful bouquets or take portraits for gay people. They were unwilling to act to promote the idea that a same-sex couple is a marriage, contrary to their deeply held religious views.

That’s the real actual reality on the ground: do you side with the government in punishing these people and blame them for losing their own businesses? That’s what the Left does. Or do you have the courage to stand with them and defend their right to use their creative talents as they see fit.

A gay wedding is a choice. Refusing to serve one is not refusing to serve a kind of person.

What is speculative is the idea that somehow if we let people keep their livelihoods, a mass movement of bakers for shaming divorcees is somehow going to develop. That’s your fantasy, Gov. Kasich. The reality is what you are choosing to ignore and to ridicule: the government is redefining traditional Christian understandings of marriage as the equivalent of racism, and the Left is marshaling the long arm of the law to enforce these strange new progressive moralities. And you are okay with that, aren’t you?

Maggie Gallagher is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project.