Can religious business owners discriminate after ruling?

A Supreme Court ruling in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to make a custom cake for a same-sex wedding could mark the first step toward allowing businesses to withhold certain services based on religious grounds, but it doesn’t open the floodgates for widespread discrimination.

Although symbolically the outcome was a victory for religious freedom, legal analysts said the ruling was very specific to the circumstances of this particular case, which covered Jack Phillips’ decision not to provide a cake to same-sex couple Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins.

That means it’s unclear whether other businesses with religious objections can discriminate against customers based on their beliefs.

But most experts agree that the circumstances in which discrimination is potentially legally allowed are very few in the eyes of the law, even after Monday’s ruling written by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

“You’ve got a possible basis for constitutional protection, but there’s some uncertainty about it,” said Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia law professor and expert on religious liberty who won a Supreme Court case in 2015 establishing Muslim prisoner’s right to grow a beard. “It does not create a simple across-the-board right to conscientious objection.”

People who object to same-sex relationships aren’t suddenly free to discriminate at will, said Christopher C. Lund, a Wayne State University Law School professor who teaches religious liberty courses.

“If you’re a religious baker in a different jurisdiction and you feel a conscientious objection to doing a cake for a gay wedding, you don’t know what will happen — you might held be liable, maybe you won’t,” Lund said. “But in most of these cases, the religious bakers, the florists, the photographers have been losing, and I think there’s every reason to believe they’re going to continue to lose.”

Key to the narrow nature of the ruling: The Supreme Court cited comments by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and by an appeals court that were inappropriately hostile to Phillips and his religious beliefs.

JoLynn Markison, partner at the labor and employment practice of law firm Dorsey & Whitney, said the court did not rule on the fundamental nature of the Civil Rights Commission’s decision against Phillips.

“The Supreme Court may have dodged the issue for now, but it will not be able to avoid it forever,” Markison wrote in an analysis of the ruling.