This week’s Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County is being rightly applauded, as it expands legal protections against employment discrimination to LGBTQ people. The majority opinion — written by hard-right Trump pick Neil Gorsuch, who joined the court’s dwindling group of liberals to deliver the 6-3 ruling — has predictably enraged the Right, who accused Gorsuch of being a traitor, a fraud, and a secret liberal whose ruling shows Trump has failed to arrest the supposed ascendance of liberalism in US politics.

Mercifully, the reaction from the liberal side of things has so far largely avoided the depressing tendency to use this single, exceptional case to cast Gorsuch as “one of the good conservatives.” Even supporters of the ruling have cautioned that it doesn’t mean Gorsuch is or will act like an ally. Still, some of the responses from the liberal center — from the New York Times citing Gorsuch’s personal tolerance for homosexuality in claiming that he led the way in the decision to CNN’s exultation that it “puts Gorsuch in the history books” to the laudatory responses from some clueless Twitter personalities — shows the potential is there.

Left unchecked, it’s not hard to imagine well-meaning people years from now flattening Gorsuch’s judicial record into this one case to turn him into a symbol of judicial moderation on a hard-right court. This is, after all, exactly what happened with Gorsuch’s mentor, Anthony Kennedy, the “swing justice” whose actual legacy was a sweeping conservative rollback of hard-won civil rights protections.