If your political goal of the moment weren’t to carve out legal safe spaces for discriminating against gays and lesbians, but merely to protect individual religious artisans—bakers, florists, photographers—from being forced to lend their labor to the planning and execution of same-sex weddings, think of how you’d go about it.

This is obviously how conservatives frame their efforts to pass “religious freedom” laws, which provide all manner of businesses the ability to defend acts of discrimination in court. But on the face of it, they’ve proposed a solution to a different problem than the one they claim to care about.

The dilemma conservatives claim to care about is actually pretty easy to resolve, if you examine its unspoken elements. But those elements include a presumption that gays and lesbians are generally entitled to the same kinds of legal protections as other minorities. The advocates of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act aren’t willing to grant that presumption, though, and they thus find themselves hoist on the petard of their own bad faith.

The very notion that a Christian photographer or florist should be able to decline business solicitations from same-sex couples implies that the vast majority of entrepreneurs should not. When you look at the conundrum not just from the perspective of religious persons, but from the perspective of the entire market, the remedy becomes clear. A legal default prohibiting discrimination against LGBT people as a class, with a modest carveout for individuals in creative trades who have religious objections to making things that contribute to the planning and execution of same-sex weddings.

But if you frame the carveout this way, then the anti-discrimination default comes with it. Conservatives aren’t willing to grant it, so instead we get these kinds of disingenuous or blinkered arguments. Here we have the odd spectacle of National Review’s editors presuming to speak for gays and lesbians in Indiana, as if gay people and religious Christians were similar in their antitheses to Catholics and Protestants, and thus making a mortifying error: