The Powerful Headwinds Confronting Religious Freedom

(Excerpt) In the next few months, the Supreme Court will decide Masterpiece Cakeshop, one of a series of cases in which conservative Christians have sought exemptions from public-accommodation laws that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Like most of these disputes, the case involves a small business that declined, because of the owner’s Christian convictions, to perform a service in connection with a same-sex wedding—in this case, designing and baking a wedding cake. In most of these disputes, the lower courts have been unwilling to grant businesses religious exemptions from anti-discrimination rules