Patty cake, patty cake, baker's man, bake me a cake as fast as you can. And if you don't, we'll sue you, bankrupt your business, and harass you with violent Twitter and Facebook messages even to include death threats. Why? Because you are intolerant and we won't tolerate intolerance.

Yes, they're back. First in Arizona, now in Indiana, the forces of "tolerance" have once more revealed themselves as the bullies, even latent totalitarians, that they are.

The Indiana law, like other state versions of the federal religious rights law, is condemned as discrimination against homosexuals because a business owner might use his freedom of religion as a reason not to provide service. In some cases, however, such discrimination is acceptable. Businesses may, for example, discriminate against concealed carry permit holders simply by posting a "gun free zone" sign on the door.

Concealed carry is legal in all 50 states but business owners who disapprove may opt out. It's their choice and they need no grounds other than that they don't like the law. Why is this not illegal discrimination but declining to participate in the preparations for a same sex wedding is? That's easy. Because the left likes gun control but doesn't like religious rights.

Interestingly, not one of these cases has been brought against a Muslim baker, several of whom in Dearborn, Michigan have refused to bake wedding cakes for same sex weddings. This, you see, poses a dilemma for progressives. Call a Muslim a homophobe for refusing to bake a same sex wedding cake and you risk being called an Islamophobe. Tricky, isn't it? Rather like the emotional trauma of an environmentalist agonizing over whether or not to stop the endangered animal from eating the endangered plant.

The fact is that freedom of religion has become an obstacle to the political agenda of the far left (of which gay rights is only one part). Though it's the very first right noted in the very first amendment of the Bill of Rights, freedom of religion simply has gotten in the way of the progressive ideal that there should be no focus of personal loyalty between the individual and the government. All of Edmund Burke's "little platoons" - family, church, businesses, civic organizations; natural buffers between us and government - must be either controlled or eliminated. With regard to religion, this attitude was neatly summed up by activist Mitchell Gold, who recently said, "Church leaders must be made to take homosexuality off the sin list." Made by whom? By government, of course; the progressive default setting. But should government really be defining sin? If so, then so much for the separation of church and state and for freedom of religion.

Part of the battle plan is to portray this movement as the equivalent of the black civil rights movement though the two are worlds apart. Black Americans were systematically oppressed in ways that effectively kept them out of the mainstream of American life for decades. Homosexuals have never come remotely close to being in that situation. There have been a few silly laws (hardly ever enforced) making private acts illegal. There has been sporadic violence against gays. And homosexual behavior historically has been viewed by heterosexuals with repugnance. But where is the parallel between the horrendous treatment of blacks and the usually merely disdainful treatment of gays? There is no parallel despite the fevered insistence of the left that disapproving heterosexuals are hateful bigots in the mold of the KKK.

Sadly, the gay rights movement has gone from making reasonable pleas for greater tolerance to making strident and utterly intolerant demands for cultural conformity and government-enforced slap-downs of anyone who has the temerity to disapprove. Nonetheless, sometimes rights conflict with each other. When they do, freedom of religion, the first right recognized in our Constitution, certainly should get precedence over the universal availability of baked goods.