Since Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not a single conservative Christian plaintiff has lost on the merits at the Supreme Court. The judicial justifications for these decisions have become increasingly implausible, and taken together they have made the law increasingly unintelligible.

It will get worse. A case now heading to the court offers a genuinely sympathetic claimant whose probable victory will make the law even more dangerously incoherent.

Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Denver, won an earlier case in the Supreme Court in 2018. He objects to same-sex marriage on religious grounds and so refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The couple sued, citing Colorado’s ban on sexual orientation discrimination. The case promised to address major questions about the balance between gay rights and religious liberty, but the court ended up disposing of it in a way that evaded those questions by inventively declaring that the state adjudicators were biased against Phillips.

Autumn Scardina is a transgender woman. On the day that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the earlier case, she called Phillips’s bakery to order a pink cake with blue frosting. She did not describe any words or decorations. The bakery confirmed that it could make the cake. Then Scardina declared that the cake was to celebrate her transition from male to female. Phillips thereupon refused the order, later explaining that he “won’t design a cake that promotes something that conflicts with [his] Bible’s teachings” and that “he believes that God designed people male and........

© The Hill