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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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So when you hear about a high profile case, does it matter if the person was specifically set up as a test case, and if it matters, why?

Yes. Rosa Parks is one case, but so is 'Jane Roe' in Roe vs Wade, and the striking down of the Texas sodomy laws (which, depending what account you read, needed the parties involved to set it up so that the cops would come bust them, and they got them there on another excuse).

Some laws are permitted to quietly wither away on the vine as social attitudes change, so test cases sometimes don't do much. Apart from making the name of ambitious lawyers who scent an easy victory, they don't really change anything much.

Other cases, like Rosa Parks, do provide an impetus, but in that case there was a strong social prejudice remaining which backed up the law.

And then there's the "bake the cake, bigots" cases where you have people ringing around several bakeries/pizza parlours until they find the one exception that they can then use. Where you have nine out of ten bakers happy to bake your trans gay cake, and only one hold-out, that sounds less like "brave challenge to prejudice" and more like "everyone must be Havel's Greengrocer".

So yeah, it depends (1) what the case is (2) who is bringing it and why.