Author Topic: Conservative justices seem poised to side with web designer who opposes same-sex marriage  (Read 343 times)

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Offline Elderberry

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SCOTUSblog by Amy Howe 12/5/2022

ARGUMENT ANALYSIS

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on Monday in the case of Lorie Smith, a website designer and devout Christian who wants to expand her business to include wedding websites – but only for opposite-sex couples. Smith is challenging a Colorado law that prohibits most businesses from discriminating against LGBTQ customers. Requiring her to create websites for same-sex weddings, she argues, would violate her right to freedom of speech.

At the oral argument, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asserted that a ruling for Smith would be the first time that the Supreme Court had ruled that “commercial businesses could refuse to serve a customer based on race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation.” But Chief Justice John Roberts countered that the Supreme Court has never approved efforts to compel speech that is contrary to the speaker’s belief, and his five conservative colleagues signaled that they were likely to join him in a ruling for Smith.

Representing Smith, lawyer Kristen Waggoner emphasized that Smith “decides what to create based on the message, not who requests it.” Smith is not asking the Supreme Court, she emphasized, to create new law. Instead, she assured the justices, she is only asking them to apply their existing precedent. Under the Supreme Court’s 1995 decision in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, & Bisexual Group, holding that Massachusetts could not require the private organizers of Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade to allow an LGBTQ group to march in the parade, the question before the court is a simple two-part test: Is the good or service involved speech, and – if so – is the message affected by the speech it was required to accommodate? The answer in this case to both questions, Waggoner concluded, is yes.

Colorado Solicitor General Eric Olson told the justices that the law at the center of the case, known as a public-accommodation law because it requires businesses that serve the public to serve everyone, merely targets discriminatory sales, rather than a speaker’s message. A store, he noted, could decide that it will only sell Jewish-themed items, but it can’t refuse to sell those items to Muslim or Christian customers. And he warned that the exemption that Smith is seeking is “sweeping”: It would apply not only to sincere religious beliefs like Smith’s, he said, but also to all kinds of racist, sexist, and bigoted claims.

The court’s more liberal justices expressed doubt about whether, in creating a wedding website, Smith would be expressing a message at all. Noting that two of her clerks are engaged to be married, Justice Elena Kagan observed that the clerks’ wedding websites contain similar features – for example, the couples’ names, their wedding dates, and links to things like the schedules for the wedding weekend and the couples’ registries. “They’re not particularly ideological or particularly religious,” Kagan said. “They’re not particularly anything.” Therefore, Kagan suggested, the dispute in Smith’s case is not about the content of the speech, but instead Smith’s resistance to its use in a same-sex wedding.

Waggoner pushed back, telling Kagan that Smith’s objection does not stem from how the site would be used or by whom, but instead from the fact that Colorado’s public-accommodation law would require her to create a message that she believes to be false.

More: https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/12/conservative-justices-seem-poised-to-side-with-web-designer-who-opposes-same-sex-marriage/

Offline roamer_1

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This is all bullcrap.

As a business owner, my business is a direct extension of myself and is my property.
Even as I have a direct control over every aspect of my home, I have the exact same control over my business. I have the right to refuse service to ANYONE for ANY REASON. I can kick you out of my store for any damn reason I want.

If I happen to be a nazi or homophobe, and refuse to do business on that basis, then so be it. Go take your business somewhere else... Let the market decide.

The basis of business is two people voluntarily entering into a contract. VOLUNTARY. From both directions.