"Gorsuch has developed a habit of misattributing purposes to statutes and then complaining that the purposes either were bad ones or were being pursued in a discriminatory way. His own concurrence in Masterpiece presented a convoluted misinterpretation of Colorado’s simple requirement that one treat all customers alike, in order to claim that people whom the law didn’t even mention were thereby treated unfairly. Now he claims that “Colorado seeks to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance.” This is just false. Colorado wasn’t trying to force anyone to do anything. Smith sued the state, aggrieved by what she thought it might do sometime in the future. On the one hand, the decision might be interpreted narrowly, to apply only to businesses that take specific commissions for unique artwork. On the other hand, the free speech theories floated in Masterpiece, to which Gorsuch was sympathetic, were so broad that they would protect absolutely any discrimination, or for that matter any other conduct, that a court wanted to protect. Gorsuch’s casual way with inconvenient facts, and vague statements of the law, suggests that we can’t be confident of what just happened. The court, however, is supposed to tell us what the law is, not just hand opaquely reasoned victories to every conservative Christian who walks in the door."
Neil Gorsuch

January 1, 1970