In a case nearly identical to that of the Colorado baker Jack Phillips, Oregon’s Board of Labor and Industries imposed a $135,000 fine on the proprietors of a bakery for declining to provide a cake for a lesbian wedding. Yesterday, the Supreme Court temporarily spared the bakery owners the fine—which threatened to put them out of business—and sent the case back to the lower courts that had initially upheld it. David Harsanyi hopes that in the future in the Supreme Court will take a less ambiguous stance on such cases:

[M]ainstream news outlets like to report that Phillips refused “to bake a wedding cake” or denied a gay couple “service.” Phillips, however, didn’t query his customers about their sexual preferences or their preferred pronouns; nor did he bar anyone from purchasing any products made in his shop, a place of public accommodation. No, Colorado had attempted to compel a citizen to say something he didn’t believe.

After years of fiscal and personal struggles, Phillips finally prevailed, but only because of a narrow Supreme Court decision that found that [Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission, which first took action against him], hadn’t displayed religious neutrality and exhibited “a clear and impermissible hostility toward [his] sincere religious beliefs” when pursuing Phillips. That is a nice way of saying commissioners had compared orthodox Christians to Nazis and segregationists—because nothing says “inclusion” like comparing a genteel baker . . . to a murderous SS officer. . . .

Next time, though, commissioners in Colorado and elsewhere will, no doubt, be more careful about their public statements. What stops them from destroying a business then? Very little, apparently. . . .

The Supreme Court could effectively strip these extra-constitutional civil-rights commissions, which have become little more than star chambers that punish citizens for wrongthink, of much of their power. It might even undermine frivolous lawsuits.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.