Last summer, in the days after the Supreme Court decided Masterpiece Cakeshop on the narrow grounds that Colorado had violated Jack Phillips's religious-liberty rights by specifically disparaging his religious beliefs, a bit of a skirmish broke out among conservative lawyers. How important was the ruling? Did it have any lasting precedential effect?
For those who don't recall, the Supreme Court ruled for Phillips in large part because a commissioner of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission called Phillips's claim that he enjoyed a religious-freedom right not to be forced to design a custom cake for a gay wedding a "despicable piece of rhetoric." The commissioner also denigrated religious-liberty arguments as being used to justify slavery and the Holocaust.
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