Via Rod Dreher, who gleans this from the incident: “You must not only bake the cake, or arrange the flowers, or make the ring, you must hold the correct opinion when you do it.”

A lesbian couple came into the jeweler’s shop looking for custom-made rings for their wedding. No problem, he told them. Later the couple recommended him to some friends, who dropped by — and noticed a sign on the wall that read, “The sanctity of marriage is under attack. Let’s keep marriage between a man and a woman.” The lesbian couple then decided they wanted a refund on their rings, the media picked up the story, and now the jeweler’s being threatened for his thoughtcrime. Of such things are the mileposts on the road to perfect tolerance made.

“It seems to be a Canadian right to post what you believe,” said the jeweler in his own defense. It does?

“I have been posting different aspects of my religious beliefs the last 11 years, and I’ve never had one single problem with any of my customers,” he said…

“One of the reasons my family chose to come to Canada was the freedom of rights,” he said, noting the freedom of religion and freedom of speech…

“I feel really bad that [White] feels that we would in any way try to hurt or discriminate against her, but we will not retract from what we believe. I cannot say, ‘Well because you feel bad, I will stop believing what I believe,'” he said.

“When I walk on Church Street in Toronto, where I am right now, and I see [LGBT rainbow flags], and I see a lot of signs and a lot of things on public property, I don’t have a problem with them. I accept it. I chose to come to Canada… and we accept the whole package… I don’t discriminate against that, nor do I come and tell them to take them down. For the same reason, I ask to have the same respect in return, especially when it’s in my own business.”

Initially he refused to grant the refund on principle, so that he wouldn’t be seen as apologizing for his beliefs. He did the work they requested, they were happy with the result. What’s the grounds for a refund? Now that he’s been harassed, he’s decided to return their money and hope this all goes away. Witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational gay-rights battle station: At this point, they don’t have to go to the effort of mounting an actual boycott to get religious believers to back down. They don’t even need actual discriminatory conduct to motivate outrage mobs. (Although we already knew that from the Memories Pizza debacle.) All it takes to make a small business fear for its financial survival and the owner to fear for his actual survival is the media noticing a mundane expression of support for traditional marriage, irrespective of whether that support affects business practices in any way. The private enforcement regime against anti-SSM blasphemy is turning out to be even more effective than the legal one.