This reply is growing exceedingly lengthy, so I'm going to break it into multiple comments.

Part 1:

I don't like a Christian cake restaurant being forced into making a cake for a gay wedding, or a church being forced to allow a gay wedding, or being forced to provide birth control, etc

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or nationality. I think that's a good thing. Suppose you walked into a restaurant with a gold crucifix hanging from your neck. The owner of sees it and flies off the handle, yelling "Get out! No Christians allowed here!"

Now, some people would say they wouldn't want to eat at a place where they're not wanted and that they'd go somewhere else, but that's not always an option (if we were talking about a movie theater, for example, most towns only have one). Just going to a different restaurant also doesn't change the fact that that kind of discrimination is humiliating and can cause emotional and psychological trauma if it occurs often enough. I'm glad we have laws that try to prevent it, and which gives the victims legal recourse if it does.

Now, sexual orientation is not a protected class on the federal level (hopefully it will be someday), but some states are starting to pass legislation on their own in order to extend those same protections to sexual orientation. Such is the case in Oregon and Colorado, for example, where bakery owners have been charged with illegal discrimination for turning away customers because they were homosexual.

This is a clear violation of the law, and I don't have a problem with people being forced to comply with the law in those cases. In the same way that a restaurant or theater owner shouldn't be able to turn you away for being Christian, a bakery owner shouldn't be able to turn a customer away for being homosexual.

However. Many people have seen those types of cases and jumped to the conclusion that it could mean clergy will be forced to officiate gay weddings. That is not the case. Churches are not legally classified as places of public accommodation. That means the Civil Rights Act doesn't apply to them, in the same sense that the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn't apply to them (churches aren't legally required to have wheelchair ramps, like public businesses are). It's completely legal for churches to discriminate against protected classes, and it's highly unlikely that this will change in the future. That would be a huge can of worms that no politician seeking reelection would want to open.