> You can't compel custom work, any more than a Neo Nazi can compel a Jewish baker to bake a custom swastika cake.

That is your opinion,but that was not the opinion of the Supreme Court. They found that the Colorado statute in question was based on religious hostility and therefore discriminatory against the cake shop. (That is, the "personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer.) Agree or disagree, I encourage you to read the full opinion.

Moreover, there is no law against "compelled custom work." Had the cake shop discriminated based on the customer's race, rather then their sexual orientation, the refusal would have been illegal.

That is not what the supreme court found at all. In the opinion of the supreme court, they found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted in religious hostility in their evaluation of Masterpiece, and that the commission lacked consistency among similar cases. Kennedy's opinion noted that he may have been inclined to rule in favor of the Commission if it had remained religiously neutral in previous evaluations.

They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer". The Court explicitly avoided ruling broadly on the intersection of anti-discrimination laws and rights to free exercise.

Fair enough - I didn't know that.

But I don't see how the logic is wrong in my equivalent example. You can't ban people from your shop based on protected characteristics - everyone should be able to buy the same things from you, but that doesn't mean you can enforce that people do custom work for you. Maybe that statement works really well here, but breaks down in other examples, but that was my interpretation of the validity of the case.

> They did not evaluate if the ""personal liberty" of the cake shop was more important than the civil rights of the customer".

But we're here to discuss the rhetoric in the right around "personal liberty." The cake case is an example of using that rhetoric to justify discrimination, which is exactly what happened. That is the effect of the SCOTUS decision, regardless of whether they used those words verbatim.

The rhetoric around "personal liberty" was not used in the cake case, and was not used to justify discrimination. If the commission had been more neutral then the case, using the same arguments, could had gone the exact opposite. The cake case was ruled based on the performance of the commission in their work as a government entity. The outcome was that Masterpiece won, but the victory was not based on the merit of Masterpiece.

It is similar to when a criminal case get thrown out because investigators messed up and mishandled evidence. It says nothing about the merit of the case.