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US Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh and US Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett arrive at the inauguration of Joe Biden at the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2021Drew Angerer / Staff / Getty

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WASHINGTON, D.C., July 2, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – The Supreme Court of the United States has rejected another plea from religious Americans to restore their right to free exercise of religion, this time concerning a Christian florist in Richmond, Washington.

For years, Barronelle Stutzman, the Christian proprietor of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, has been forced into court for refusing to provide flowers for a customer’s same-sex “wedding” ceremony. She had previously served the customer’s every other request for years, and has employed homosexual workers, but her Christian faith compelled her to draw a distinction between serving all individuals and lending her artistic endorsement to celebrations of homosexuality.

The Washington Supreme Court ruled in 2017 that the government may force Christians to serve same-sex “weddings,” a decision the U.S. Supreme Court vacated in 2018, with directions that the lower court consider the case again in light of SCOTUS’s then-recent ruling in favor of Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips (which did not end the similar attacks on Phillips).

Yet the Washington Supreme Court ruled against Stutzman again in 2019, prompting her attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to again petition the nation’s highest court.

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court released an updated order list revealing it was refusing to hear the case, leaving the lower ruling against Stutzman in effect. ADF called the news “disappointing,” but without elaborating declared their “fight isn’t over”:

Beyond what it means for Arlene’s Flowers, the decision is another ill omen for conservatives who had placed their hopes in former President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees to restore a more originalist understanding of the Constitution to American law. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch were the only justices who voted to hear the case, meaning Trump’s other two appointees, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, voted to reject it.

Despite some narrow victories for pro-life regulations, religious liberty and other consevative causes, the current Supreme Court (often mischaracterized by both sides as a “conservative majority”), has also made a number of liberal decisions, most notoriously Gorsuch’s 2020 majority opinion redefining “sex discrimination” in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to add sexual orientation and gender identity, in addition to its original biological meaning (Kavanaugh voted with conservatives in that case, and Barrett was not yet on the court).

More recently, Barrett and Kavanaugh also sided with the court’s liberals in voting to dismiss cases concerning federal abortion funding under Title IX and a transgender “right” to opposite-sex bathrooms in public schools, with Gorsuch joining them in the latter case.