The former and possibly future Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Sunday offered a provocative analogy in defense of a controversial Indiana law that opponents say opened the way for discrimination by businesses against gay and lesbian customers and employees.

Appearing on CBS, Santorum said the Indiana law was meant to protect the same kind of autonomy for businesses that a hypothetical gay owner of a print shop would wish for if he was hired to create a placard for the Westboro Baptist Church reading “God hates fags”.

“It’s a matter of accommodation,” Santorum told CBS. “Tolerance is a two-way street. If you are a print shop, and you are a gay man, should you be forced to print ‘God Hates Fags’ for the Westboro Baptist Church – because they hold those signs up? Should the government force you to do that?

“And that’s what these cases are all about … And that’s where we just need some space to say, let’s have tolerance be a two-way street.”

Such placards are ubiquitous at rallies staged by the Westboro Baptist Church, a notorious Topeka-based group that pickets funerals and other events.

Santorum, formerly a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, said that Indiana’s so-called religious freedom law, signed and then amended earlier this month by Governor Mike Pence, was not discriminatory.

“This is acceptable language … it’s a good bill,” Santorum said. “I’m not a legal scholar, but I can tell you the way that the previous laws have been ruled [on], that they have not provided any type of legal protection for [discrimination].”

The Indiana law established that the state could not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” except in cases of a “compelling government interest”. Proponents of the law praised it for allowing “Christian bakers, florists and photographers” to decline participation in “homosexual marriage” on religious grounds.

Legal scholars, however, judged it to differ from a comparable federal statute in a way that invited discrimination. In response to national outrage over the law last week, Pence announced in a chagrined news conference that he had asked for a legislative patch while insisting that the original legislation was not discriminatory.

The governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, amended a similar law this week.

Later in his CBS appearance, Santorum was asked whether he was running for president in 2016, having shown strongly in the Republican primaries in 2012. “I have no announcements to make today,” he said.