(American Prospect) -- The new Supreme Court term has led to a raft of commentary suggesting that the marquee case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission poses a tough call for the nation’s highest court. The case, involving a conservative Christian baker’s defiance of his state’s nondiscrimination law in refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, is likely to be a 5-4 nail-biter, as many dedicated court-watchers predict. Hardly an isolated episode in the ongoing culture wars, Masterpiece Cakeshop is part of the current aggressive conservative drive for religious and “conscience” exemptions from neutral and generally applicable laws and policies not to their liking.
The justices on the court’s farthest right flank (Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch) are expected to side with the baker, with the four more liberal members (Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan) going the other way, and conservative “swing” justice Anthony Kennedy, at once “the court’s most prominent defender of gay rights and most ardent supporter of free speech,” as Adam Liptak of The New York Times has put it, playing his familiar role as The Decider.
