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Window Land wrote:

Additionally, a similar case appeared once before when a Colorado baker refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. However, that case wound up with the court ruling in favor of the baker while punting the main question into the future, because the prosecution decided attacking the baker's religion directly during trial was a good idea.

That Colarado case was discussed by the UK supreme court in a similar cake-based controversy in Northern Ireland where a baker had declined to make a cake with the words "support gay marriage" on it. It wasn't a request for a wedding cake because at that time same sex marriage wasn't possible in Northern Ireland. The UK court ruled that this wasn't discrimination because the baker would have made a cake with different words on it for the gay customer, and would not have made a cake with those words if asked to do so by a straight customer. Any discrimination was against the words and not the customer, with words having no legal protection.

That seems pretty straightforward. The Colarado case is more complicated because the request for a wedding cake was refused without a design being considered - it was simply the case that the baker would make a wedding cake for a straight couple but not for a gay couple. I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds like it would be a violation of European human rights law which makes it clear that a service can't be withheld on the basis that the customer has a protected characteristic. It sounds as if dealing with the same issue using the First Amendment and Colarado laws on freedom of religion is quite a bit more complicated.

On your point about needing a good reason to go tampering with the laws left by the founding fathers, isn't it the case that tampering is happening all the time? Aside from the fact that the constitution has 26 amendments, the authors of the First Amendment would have had no idea what a website is and in all probability never considered the notion of same sex marriage. It's not as if cases are actually settled by deciding how they would have viewed a roughly analogous situation involving a pamphlet, newspaper or something they would have understood. I was genuinely surprised when I learned that the First Amendment is a single sentence and that the rest of it is precedent and case law that's built up over time. Surely the role of the original writers is pretty minimal by now. US courts might not be handling laws that are rewritten from scratch every few decades like their European counterparts, but I suspect the key provisions are often equally recent.

Similarly I'm a little confused by the Second Amendment, because on the whole people who cite it when buying weapons don't go on to form a well regulated militia, and the modern US in not organised in such a way that a militia is necessary to its security. The Amendment seems so clearly a product of its now irrelevant historical context.