The burden imposed on gays in the case we're discussing—very occasionally having to choose a different wedding vendor for a subset of nuptial services provided by professionals engaged in expressive activity covered by the First Amendment—is thankfully tiny in comparison to historic uses of nondiscrimination law.

Again, that isn't to say I think it's right to discriminate against gay weddings in this way. I think it's wrong, and that the best remedy in these sorts of cases is persuasion. Remember that wonderful liberal tool?

There can be no denying that persuasion has radically changed the attitudes of Americans toward gays and lesbians in recent years. So many grandparents and parents I know have been persuaded by their children to let go of long held prejudices and stereotypes. Everyone heartened by the spread of gay marriage, as I am, or encouraged by the backlash against anti-gay bullying, which ought to grow stronger still, can take heart in the fact that every trend is moving in the right direction.

Yet there is widespread dismissal of persuasion as a serious remedy—and a similarly confounding certainty that fining photographers will prove more effective, even though non-discrimination law has arguably done far less for gay equality.

Well, let's try persuasion, if only in this space.

I'd very much like to persuade the tiny subset of Christian professionals who feel conscience-bound to decline business from same-sex marriages to reconsider their position. For familiarity's sake, I'll stick with the example of a photographer, a creative professional that represents the most difficult case for my view.

Unlike a hotel owner or a convenience-store manager, a wedding photographer is often a sole proprietor who works closely with clients on an interpersonal level. One way of understanding the role is a charge to make the wedding itself look good, using some combination of personal artistic vision and technical training.

An orthodox Christian photographer with a traditionalist, procreative understanding of marriage might feel that, by using her artistic talent on a same-sex wedding, she would be glorifying something she believes to be sinful; alternatively, such a photographer might feel that there is a falseness to using her artistry to portray as a marriage ceremony something she believes is nothing of the sort.

But there is a different way of looking at things, and I invite religious photographers to consider it, because I believe it is analytically sound and more Christian.

In this view, a wedding photographer's charge is to capture the reality of an event as the couple is experiencing it. Doing so to the satisfaction of the client doesn't require believing that an actual marriage is taking place, any more than photographing a First Communion requires the photographer to believe that the child is actually consuming the body of Christ. It is enough, at the communion, to capture the joyful tear on the cheek of the mother and the awe in the child's eyes.