Allowing proprietors to reserve their bathrooms, dressing rooms, and locker rooms for people whose genders are biologically determined (there are some things you never expect to write) is a matter of property rights and common sense. If we believe government should micromanage which boys or girls can use the bathroom, then what doesn’t government have a right to micromanage? As for the constitutionality of the law, I’ll leave that to Hillary Clinton’s SCOTUS — which will almost certainly value “empathy” over archaic freedoms. But for now, this is the best states can do to protect themselves from the dictates of the court.

The blowback I get from posts like this usually illustrates that many liberals aren’t even superficially concerned about the First Amendment, freedom of association, or the gay couple who is supposedly devastated by the beliefs of a 70-year-old Baptist florist. The problem is the thought crime.

Progressives regularly argue that the state should be empowered to take the role of church, instructing believers when they should set aside their faith. This is why editors and writers adorn the words religious freedom with quotation marks. “Religious liberty” becomes a scam, a phony ideal used by fake Christians to mask their true contempt for gays. This is the tone that’s embedded in most of the coverage.