When Arizona's then-Governor Jan Brewer vetoed legislation last February to protect religious individuals and business owners who deny services to gays and lesbians, she lost favor with many Christian conservatives. But as the public backlash grows against Indiana, whose governor, Mike Pence, just signed a similar "religious freeom" law, Brewer now looks prescient.

In a statement accompanying her veto, she wrote, “I sincerely believe that Senate Bill 1062 has the potential to create more problems than it purports to solve.” That's exactly what's happening in Indiana: thousands of protesters, and, likely, a loss of business. You can’t claim to be a pro-growth conservative and then intentionally make your state the epicenter of a massive boycott, which explains why Pence is now promising to "clarify" the law.

Now comes the backlash to the backlash, in which conservatives—including most of the major presumptive Republican candidates for president—insist that the Indiana statute and similar efforts are merely intended to protect the religious liberties of struggling bakers and florists who don’t want to sell their services to same-sex spouses. National Review’s editors called it “another skirmish in the endless battle of the Big Gay Wedding Cake.”

The image evoked, of a sole proprietor conscripted unwillingly into labor, is easy to construct, both because it’s the most politically convenient way for conservatives to portray liberals as illiberal, and because it happens to be taken from real life. Some liberals really do want to tell self-employed bakers, photographers, and florists who work from home studios and kitchens that they aren’t free to choose their clients if they use bigoted bases to do so. And that’s allowed conservatives to fashion themselves as tribunes for beleaguered believers, when, more accurately, they’re trying to carve out the legal equivalent of "safe spaces"—much mocked on the right—to shield the right from the emerging marriage equality consensus.

If conservatives merely wanted to protect the occasional “tradition-minded florists and bakers,” as National Review dubbed them, they could have done so explicitly. One could even make a compelling argument that the First Amendment should protect individuals engaged in creative trades who don’t want to be compelled in this way.