New Mexico's Supreme Court is at war with the First Amendment right to freedom of religion

You've probably heard by now about the NM Supreme Court deciding that a wedding photographer had to take the business of a lesbian couple.  Tom Trinko at American Thinker looks into the deeply flawed "reasoning" behind the ruling:

The first glaring error is the Court's assumption that the New Mexico state legislature can make laws unconstrained by the constitutional rights of the citizens of New Mexico.

Liberals in general agree with that idea to the extent that it is useful for their agenda -- which is why, when asked, so many liberals in government can't explain how their legislation is within the powers given to them by the Constitution but can quickly explain why the Constitution requires that pornography be legal.

But given that Americans have repudiated neither the rule of law nor the Constitution, it is unclear how any rational judge can conclude that forcing people to do things they believe to be immoral is consistent with those individuals' First Amendment rights. 

The second glaring error is that this decision is content-based.  We all know that if a liberal photographer had refused to photograph a neo-Nazi skinhead wedding, the New Mexico Supreme Court would have ruled differently, assuming the case had even come to trial.  Even more importantly, note that given the New Mexico Supreme Court's ruling, if a gay photographer refused to photograph a Christian wedding, he'd be protected by law because Christians, unlike gays, do not enjoy special status under New Mexico law.  No reasonable person can believe that the Constitution supports fundamental rights only for specially protected groups, but not for citizens in general.

The third glaring error is the assumption that one group of citizens must surrender its rights so that another group can have special rights.  It's critical to note that the gay couple in question were easily able to find another wedding photographer, so they did not suffer in any real way.  Second, note that the issue in question was not the photographer's attacking the gays in any way, nor was the photographer trying to prevent the gays from being "married."  Rather, the couple apparently has the right to compel the photographer to violate her deeply held religious beliefs.

Trinko doesn't take on the public-accomodation aspect of the court's argument, but that doesn't hold water, either.  The restaurants and lunch counters of the 1950s deep South denied service to blacks, not on the basis of objecting to being a party to sin, but rather on the basis of - well, racism, the belief that blacks were not fit biologically to take sustenance in the same environment as whites.

This is a prime example of why I cede not an inch in calling these people freedom-haters.