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The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a web designer can refuse to create websites for same-sex weddings on religious grounds. The case involved a Colorado web designer named Lorie Smith, who refused to create a website for a same-sex couple’s wedding. The couple filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, alleging that Smith’s refusal violated their civil rights.
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Also relevant: https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-gay-marriage-website-real-straight-man-supreme-court
The “gay man” this woman claims contacted her to have a wedding website made:
- Isn’t gay.
- Was already married at the time she claims he contacted her about the website.
- Denies ever contacting anyone about a wedding website, because, uh, he’s already married.
So it’s fake but not gay? I don’t know how to process this.
Christo-fascists falsifying cases in attempts to set precedent in MY legal system? Why I never….
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Wtf. This can’t be true? Or do they just say, “fuck it, we’re still debating the principle of the fictional matter!”?
That’s exactly what happened. This case was nothing more than a “thought project” and should have been tossed before it was even heard. That said, the ruling is accurate because: In a fictional scenario you can do whatever you want.
Well, they opened a way for businesses to refuse anyone for religious reason. The future doesn’t look bright now.
It doesn’t really even have to be “religious”. Any so-called “strongly held belief” now lets people discriminate.
Agreed, bet in some states people will hang signs stating “No lgbtq people allowed” or “No black people or asian people allowed” even though under the 14th amendment it protects them but supreme court choice to ignore it because of there own beliefs of hating people because they rather be rich then live under a progressive nation that is back-sliding because of our courts.
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Yep, they seem to have forgotten that it wasn’t that long ago a strongly held religious belief that blacks were lesser beings and needed to be segregated from proper folk.
Oh they didn’t forget. That’s just a bonus to them.
I don’t think they’ve forgotten.
The last time the future looked bright for this country I was listening to the radio and heard about the new “grass roots” movement called the"tea party"
This doesn’t protect them from being socially boycotted though, which will hurt their bottom line more anyway.
Sotomayor condemned the Court, the very bench she sits on, today in her dissent.
When the civil rights and women’s rights movements sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims.
And the majority’s opinion, they pat themselves on the back by attempting to indicate a limited nature to the degree that the first amendment overrides the protected class status.
the First Amendment protects acts of expressive association.
Which all of this does is now hinge “protected classes” on “expressive association”. And where is the line? In this case, the line was “the website will be using the webmaster’s words”. That is the person designing the website is speaking about an event the occurred rather than the people in the event talking about the event that occurred.
And it’s important to understand, that there is a major difference between “public accommodations” and “private clubs”. Private clubs can openly discriminate as they see fit, they openly indicate they hold no duty to accept the public at large. 303 Creative (the web company in question) is explicitly operating as a public accommodation. And SCOTUS has seen fit today to accept that a company operating as such may openly discriminate because the end product the website will produce has some magical (but ill-defined) amount of their expressiveness put into the end product, that it somehow is more the person who created it and less the person who bought it.
Sotomayor is rightly so to be beside herself in her dissent. This is a crack in something that’s been pretty rock solid. And with any crack, while today this doesn’t open season discrimination, but this sure as shit gives a big fucking door for that “expressiveness” line to be broaden. And given how quickly we’ve gone from Dobbs to 303 Creative (again that speed is also noted by Sotomayor), that “expressiveness” is absolutely going to be broaden considerably within the lifespan of everyone who is reading this comment.
It’s not just 303 Creative finally cracking the protective shell of “protected class”, it is the speed at which SCOTUS has been dismantling things that should absolutely bring chills. 303 is one thing, the blinding speed at which all of this has been happening is otherworldly in even the most optimistic attempt to take today’s loss for the LGBTQA+ community. If the last three years have been the tip of the iceberg, the iceberg itself is something no words have the ability to convey properly the degree of horrors that await the LGBTQA+ community.
We can all now refuse to work with republicans
You always could; political party was never a protected class. The SCOTUS has now allowed people to discriminate based on intrinsic traits. Under this ruling, if someone has a “strongly held belief” that they shouldn’t make websites for people of color, they are allowed to refuse.
I was about to say I was willing to defend this one on freedom of speech grounds, but no, if this was about race and not sexuality this would be reprehensible, and thus it is still reprehensible.
Welcome to America, where ‘religious liberty’ is the right to be a shitty bigot
“There’s no hate like Christian love.”
Seriously depressing. Constantly feels like we’re two steps forward and three steps backwards with a conservative majority in any legislative body.
Minority rule will inevitably lead to injustice.
Did I miss the two steps forward?
Affirmative action would have qualified as a step forward, but that’s gone now. Abortion, but that’s permanently on the ropes and I’ll die of shock if it doesn’t disappear, especially with the working class refusing to have children when they can barely feed themselves.
I do still retain the legal option to own and withdraw from my own bank account without a man’s written or spoken permission, the lack of which trapped my grandmother in a horrifically abusive relationship, so that’s pretty sweet. We came damn close to having healthcare for a minute there, before anyone noticed.
We’re ethically doing a tango.
You’re allowed to own a credit card without a man’s permission now too. Bella Abzug realized in the 1970s that she could be in congress but she couldn’t own a credit card without her husband’s permission and fought hard to end it.
Of course, I can’t wait for SCOTUS to decide that one is dead too. Ratfuckers.
Legalizing gay marriage was a step forward, and not that long ago.
So now people can deny literally anyone. People are free to put “WHITES ONLY” or “STRAIGHTS ONLY” out front
So screwed up that they decided Affirmative Action on Equal Protection grounds and then pivoted to First Amendment rights to justify this decision.
It’s a constitutional failure in the US that rights can be undermined by the court in this way without any checks.
That it is. We need to make our representative democracy more… representative. Things like:
- uncapping the seats for the house of representatives
- moving away from plurality voting
- getting rid of, or otherwise nullifying, the electoral college
There’s a boatload of other stuff but I think those three would have the greatest return on investment.
The problem is that we are living under minority rule, and the minority that is ruling knows that if they lose power they may never get it back, which makes them desperate and dangerous.
If she was forced to make a website would the couple have any recourse if she did a worse job/delivered late?
I’d like to believe so but I imagine she could just say she was too bogged down to do a good job which I’m not sure is a better scenario.
If you refuse to make the same product for someone because they’re gay, that should be illegal.
If you refuse to make a product because it’s gay, that should be within your rights. However much of a terrible person that makes you.
If a Christian asked me to make a Christian website, I’d say no and that should be within my rights. If a Christian asked me to make a hobby photography website similar to one I made for someone else, I should not be allowed to refuse on the grounds that they are Christian.
Weddings aren’t gay; it’s just a wedding in which the people involved are gay. Refusing to make a wedding website solely because the people getting married are gay is exactly what you claim should be illegal.
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So you support segregation. Good to know.
That would be because it implicitly leads to instantaneous segregation of some kind. The idea is nice, but it never goes well.
Don’t like X at your restaurant? There are other restaurants. What about when none of them will serve you either, because it’s a small town and the owners are all friends? Can’t eat takeout if you’re the wrong ethnicity now?
What if the career you’re trying to break into is a hard one and they have other candidates that fit the company better, despite being far less qualified (they are straight)? There are laws in place against this, but they’re the same ones that got affirmative action overturned because it was ruled that favoring against the majority was still oppression. That could logically make it to the floor if the first one did.
Naturally, this would extend to education. It is their strongly held belief that they shouldn’t have to teach and learn alongside others whose ideals or status they disagree with. Disruptive to the atmosphere. They can always just…set up schools specifically for them, if they’re bothered.
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Gay marriage is not in any way comparable to hate speech. A gay couple getting married is just two people getting married.
Unless you are a bigot and think people being gay is a political topic.
The idea is supposed to be applied in narrow scopes, in this case it’s intended for protected classes. It’s supposed to bar discrimination against “what” someone is (race, sex, orientation, etc.), not what they believe. So it wouldn’t be applicable to the examples you gave.
I agree that it’s a difficult balance to strike, but it may be worth the risk. I think we could ask a similar question from the other side as well, e.g. “When do we call it ‘segregation’ and where do we draw that line?”
Sounds like Civil Rights Movement 2: Electric Boogaloo, except nobody is protesting yet.
So what do we do now?
Drag the idea of stacking the SCOTUS into the mainstream so that we can unfuck the court? Drink? A little from column A and a little from column B?
What’s going to happen when the right wing puts measures into place (aside from blatant gerrymandering) to stop Democrats from getting their candidates elected, making stopping them impossible legally? 🤔
I suppose we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there. For now, though, this is not the case. Vote as if it is the last chance you’ll ever get, every election.
Oh, make no mistake, we should definitely vote straight-blue tickets or organize our own 3rd party from now on.
But this is a blatant setup for genocide. You ever read the 10 stages of genocide? If not, go hit up Human Rights Watch and read it. We’re a hard Stage 7 right now, and that means we need to start preparing for violence now. We can’t wait until the threat is imminent to prepare because by then it’ll be too late.
I don’t want to set you up for moderator action, but I’m curious as to what “start preparing for violence” looks like to you. Hypothetically speaking.
Like buying bulletproof vests to protect themselves from violence that will be coming as a result of this, talking with families and loved ones, having an escape plan in place when things get ugly, arranging to have some place to go to. Like Canada
I don’t think it’s quite so dire as all that, but if it makes you feel better it can’t hurt.
Well… that didn’t take long. I wonder how full the leopards are after that face-eating?
Another good SCOTUS ruling.
What about the web designers civil rights? It doesn’t seem right to force someone to perform work that is at odds with their religious beliefs.
While I disagree with the web designer, the same-sex couple is free to find another developer.
What if instead of a web designer, it’s a grocery store? And it’s the only grocery store in town?
Still a good ruling?
