Blowing up the Masterpiece Bakery Case.

The noise-to-signal ratio is always high for coverage of Supreme Court cases. But I don't know if I've ever seen as much outrage and hysteria and angry arguments over a case that will, objectively, affect so few people as the Masterpiece bakery case.

This is a ruling that, either way, will be unlikely to have any direct impact on more than a tiny handful of cases. As in, at most, single-digits over the course of the next few decades. It won't have any effect on most of the thousands of anti-discrimination claims filed every year, the vast majority of which are for race, gender, religion, age, disability, or other things unrelated to sexual orientation.

You would hard-pressed to find a half-dozen cake-bakers in the whole country who'd even claim they want to discriminate against gay couples. That doesn't affect the merits of this individual case, but be skeptical of everybody on both sides claiming it's some big deal or that the decision will have massive implications. It's not, and it won't. It's about clarifying one narrow sliver of ambiguity in the law, that hasn't been addressed before precisely because it's such an extremely rare set of facts. And it also has nothing to do with the marriage-equality rulings.