#anti lorie smith

[official-lorie-smith]

Reminder that I have the freedom to refuse you services, queers!

[samijami]

Lmfao both @official-lorie-smith and @steve-bannon-official have 5 followers, meanwhile @the-official-jk-rowling has like 87

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

On Thursday, Justice Neil Gorsuch released a 26-page opinion venting outrage about a legal dispute that does not exist, involving websites that do not exist. Yet this case, built on imaginary grounds, will have very real consequences for LGBTQ consumers, and for anti-discrimination laws more broadly. All of the Court’s Republican appointees joined Gorsuch’s opinion in 303 Creative v. Elenis.

That said, the fake dispute that Gorsuch imagines in his 303 Creative opinion involves a reasonably narrow legal question.

In the past, Christian right advocates have sought sweeping exemptions from state and federal civil rights laws, rooted in their expansive notion of “religious liberty.” Often, these lawsuits claimed that the Constitution’s safeguards for people of faith allow anyone who objects to LGBTQ people on religious grounds to defy any law prohibiting anti-LGBTQ discrimination.

303 Creative involves a much narrower dispute. The case centers on Lorie Smith, a website designer who wishes to expand her business into designing wedding websites — something she has never done before. She says she’s reluctant to do so, however, because she fears that if she designs such a website for an opposite-sex couple, Colorado’s anti-discrimination law will compel her to also design wedding websites for same-sex couples. And Smith objects to same-sex marriages.

As Gorsuch summarizes her claim, Smith “worries that, if she [starts designing wedding websites,] Colorado will force her to express views with which she disagrees.”

This is not a religious liberty claim, it is a free speech claim, rooted in well-established law, which says that the First Amendment forbids the government from compelling people to say something that they would rather not say. In ruling in Smith’s favor, the Court does not say that any religious conservative can defy any anti-discrimination law. It simply holds that someone like Smith, who publishes words for a living, may refuse to say something they don’t want to say.

The full implications of Gorsuch’s opinion are not entirely clear. In the past, religious conservatives have argued that artists and artisans of all kinds — including bakers, photographers, and floral arrangement designers — should also be allowed to discriminate under the First Amendment, because all artistic work necessarily entails some kind of expression. Gorsuch punts on this question, writing that “hypotheticals about photographers, stationers, and others, asking if they too provide expressive services covered by the First Amendment,” are not present in the 303 Creative case.

And it is worth emphasizing that the particular kind of work that Smith does, writing words on a publicly available website, fits more snugly within the First Amendment than a similar claim brought by a wedding cake designer or a florist.

Before this case was argued, I wrote that if Lorie Smith had been approached by a same-sex couple and refused to design a wedding website for them, and if she had then been sued for refusing to do so, then she would have a very strong First Amendment defense against such a suit. As the Supreme Court said in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (2006), “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.” And that includes the right of a web designer to refuse to write words on a website that they do not wish to write.

But none of these events have actually happened. And, for that reason, the Supreme Court should have dismissed the case.

THIS CASE SHOULD HAVE NEVER MADE IT THIS FAR

The frustrating thing about this case is that it involves an entirely fabricated legal dispute. Again, Lorie Smith has never actually made a wedding website for a paying customer. Nor has Colorado ever attempted to enforce its civil rights law against Ms. Smith. Indeed, in its brief to the Supreme Court, Colorado expressed doubt that its anti-discrimination law would even apply to Smith.

Yet Gorsuch’s majority opinion repeatedly paints Smith as a hapless victim, oppressed by wicked state officials who insist that she must proclaim a dogma that she denies. As he writes in the very first paragraph of his opinion, “Colorado does not just seek to ensure the sale of goods or services on equal terms. It seeks to use its law to compel an individual to create speech she does not believe.”

This claim is simply untrue. Colorado has not brought any enforcement action against Smith, or taken any other step to compel her to say anything at all — or to design any website that she does not want to design. Nor has anyone ever sued Smith for allegedly violating Colorado’s anti-discrimination law.

Indeed, in one particularly amusing turn, Smith alleged during an early stage of this litigation that she was approached by a man about doing some design work for his wedding to another man. Yet, after the New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant contacted this man, she learned that he never reached out to Smith — and that he was married to a woman.

These facts matter because federal courts, including the Supreme Court, do not have jurisdiction to decide hypothetical cases. As a unanimous Supreme Court held in Texas v. United States (1998), “a claim is not ripe for adjudication if it rests upon ‘contingent future events that may not occur as anticipated, or indeed may not occur at all.’” So the Court should have told Smith to go away and come back when she had a real dispute with the state of Colorado.

303 Creative, moreover, is the second time Gorsuch has taken such liberties with the truth in order to rule in favor of a religious conservative. Almost exactly one year ago, Gorsuch handed down the Court’s decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), a case about a public school football coach who, after games, would walk to the center of the 50-yard line and ostentatiously kneel down and pray before students and spectators — often while surrounded by players, community members, and even members of the press.

Indeed, in her dissent in Bremerton, Justice Sonia Sotomayor included a photo of Coach Kennedy holding such a prayer session, as a throng of uniformed football players and other individuals kneel with him, and as people holding video cameras look on.

And yet, Gorsuch’s opinion in Bremerton claimed that Kennedy merely wanted to offer a “short, private, personal prayer,” and then Gorsuch ruled in favor of Kennedy based on this fabricated version of Kennedy’s actual conduct.

Needless to say, this is aberrant behavior by a Supreme Court Justice — and really by six Supreme Court justices, since all of the Court’s Republican appointees joined Gorsuch’s decisions in 303 Creative and Kennedy.

[thesoundofchokingonabreadstick]

303 creative's website is back up

It is always morally acceptable to send messages

https://303creative.com/contact/

[schraubd]

Leaving the Mess for Later

One thing that's come up in a few of the Supreme Court's recent blockbuster decisions is the shakiness of the fact pattern in the underlying case. Mr. Kennedy in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District wasn't really just an average citizen whose desire to privately pray on his own was stymied by the evil liberal school district. Ms. Smith of 303 Creative v. Elenis might have outright falsified documents suggesting that a gay couple asked to engage her services. The Supreme Court's conservative majority did not care, blitzing ahead in decisions that made dramatic alterations to major areas of constitutional law doctrine.

At one level, I actually understand the perspective here. When it comes to abstract, "philosophical" question regarding the scope of the Establishment Clause or whether anti-discrimination law must sometimes yield to free speech commitments, the details of the individual case don't really matter. If it wasn't Kennedy, it'd be someone else. If what you care about is the broad, sweeping change -- interring Lemon v. Kurtzman for good, or laying a marker that public accommodations laws must yield to businesses right to "expressively" discriminate -- the details don't affect the underlying arguments all that much. The same claims and counterclaims that would be made in any case would be aired here. 303 Creative probably already felt like the can that was kicked down the road from Masterpiece Cakeshop. Similar impatience was seen in some of the concurrences in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia -- we know we're going to have to decide whether to revisit Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith, and we know the arguments for and against preserving the precedent, so why delay the inevitable? Just make the decision one way or the other and get it done.

At another level, though, this speaks to how the current conservative judicial cadre really doesn't care about the formalities of law and legal doctrine. It's movement conservatism through and through -- the important thing is the bottom-line results, and the Court will shoot first and let others clean up the mess later. This especially stood out for me in 303 Creative, a case where it was striking how much more legalistic Justice Sotomayor's dissent was compared to Justice Gorsuch's majority opinion. The former, whether one agrees with the result or not, worked through the relevant First Amendment doctrine via the same methodology I'd teach my students -- explaining the relevant doctrinal framework, explaining why this case falls into a particular part of the framework, and explaining the implications thereof. The majority opinion was basically an abstract ode to the importance of free expression but skipped past significant swaths of the seemingly essential legal analysis (often by vague gestures at party "stipulations" or just treating as gospel certain holdings of the Tenth Circuit). It was hard to escape the sense that the nitty-gritty details of Lorie Smith's case were not at all what interested the majority, and so they were disinclined to spend significant time on them. They wanted to make a big statement about the interplay of free speech and anti-discrimination law, so that's where they devoted their attention. 

From that vantage, the fact that Lorie Smith's case may not have been the cleanest vehicle isn't really all that important. Of course, from the vantage of lower courts trying to figure out what the hell 303 Creative actually means, it's extremely important, because nobody actually knows the concrete rule that 303 Creative is actually establishing, and the blurry fact pattern means that trying to infer it from Lorie Smith's situation is a doomed initiative. But again, that's someone else's mess to deal with. I honestly believe that the Justices in the 303 Creative majority did not care if Lorie Smith, personally, deserves the exemption from anti-discrimination law under the doctrine that will eventually lay out. What they cared about is being decisive in defending the existing of these exemptions in concept. Lorie Smith just had the good fortune to be the next case in line that could be plucked onto the docket.

I've written before of the Machiavellian character of the current Supreme Court, specifically, it's absorption of Machiavelli's advice to tyrants: that they should take their big oppressive swings early, in full force, and all at once. You won't gain any advantage from dragging things out, and you'll probably get credit if you cut back later. And the repeated pattern we've seen is of the Court taking these huge right-wing swings that delight conservatives on the level of ideology, but without much care for how they can be operationalized as a workable legal doctrine, and leaving it lower courts to clean up its mess. And to give an inch of silver lining, there is the chance (this follows from Machiavelli too) that as that "mess" resolves itself the Court will then quietly file down some of the roughest edges. The Bruen decision, which reads as a right-wing ideological fantasy document but which has unleashed utter chaos in lower courts, may be an example if the Court uses the Rahimi case to cut back the most extreme interpretations. Take the big swing, make the chest-out assertion of insisting that no amount of public necessity can weigh against robo-originalism, and then later on at their discretion maybe pick and choose a few morsels to dial back on and claw back some legitimacy.

But nonetheless, it really is striking the degree to which the conservative legal movement just no longer cares that much about the law. As a law professor, it makes for depressing teaching. As a citizen, it makes for depressing living. Just depression all around.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/03PY6Qg

[mariacallous]

It’s not clear what, exactly, Lorie Smith’s problem is. The Colorado woman aspires to be a web designer; apparently, she’s also upset that gay people can get married. Smith is an evangelical Christian who says that her faith makes her object to same-sex marriage.

This wouldn’t be anyone’s problem, except that Smith lives in a state with a robust civil rights law, one that forbids business owners who make their services available to the public from discriminating. But Smith really wants to discriminate: she hopes to be able to turn away gay clients from her as-yet-hypothetical wedding website business; she wants to put a banner at the top of her business homepage proclaiming her unwillingness to design websites for gay weddings. The law would forbid this if she ever went into business, so she’s suing.

As of now, none of this has actually come up. At the time Smith filed her lawsuit, demanding an exemption to her state’s law, she didn’t even have a business with which to discriminate. The law has never been enforced against her; she’s never had the opportunity to discriminate that she so craves. It’s not clear, in other words, that she really has standing to sue – she’s never been forced to provide services to gay people, so, in legal parlance, there’s no “injury” to speak of. But Smith is an angry conservative, and she’s found some very well-funded lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom, a huge rightwing legal organization that has embarked on a nationwide campaign of lawsuits to erode civil rights protections for gay people.

The result is 303 Creative v Elenis, a case in which Smith argues that her religious convictions mean that she shouldn’t have to comply with a generally applicable civil rights law, and should be granted license to discriminate by her state. The US supreme court heard oral arguments on Monday, and the 6-3 conservative majority is certain to hand Smith a victory allowing her to deny service to clients based on sexual orientation.

A decision from the court is expected next summer. The question, as happens so often with this rabidly conservative court, is not who is going to win. That question was probably answered the moment the court agreed to hear the case, to the point that briefings and oral arguments in hot-button culture and identity cases like 303 Creative have been rendered largely moot.

The question, instead, is how far the court will go: how much the justices will unravel the anti-discrimination laws that govern public accommodations – that is, the laws that say that businesses which serve the public cannot deny service to people based on their identity – and how much discrimination, humiliation and bigotry in public life they will unleash upon gay Americans. The question is whether the speech that Smith can deploy in any other form of her life – any belief that she already has every right to broadcast online, or in her church, or in writing, or by holding a sign up in the street – is also an opinion she is entitled to enforce through the conduct of her business.

If the 303 Creative case sounds familiar, that’s because it’s more or less a rerun. In 2018, the supreme court heard Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission, another case by a business owner challenging the same state law, this time a baker who didn’t want to make a gay couple’s wedding cake. In that case, the court punted, ruling that lower tribunals had mishandled the case, but not making a decision on the merits about whether an individual businessperson’s opinions trumped civil rights law. But the court looked very different in 2018: that punting opinion was written by Anthony Kennedy, who retired soon thereafter and was replaced by his protege, the beer enthusiast Brett Kavanaugh. Since then the court has lurched even further to the right, and has shown a willingness to indulge even the most far-fetched claims of Christian religious litigants.

But it’s worth considering what the court did not do when it agreed to hear 303 Creative: it did not grant certiorari on Smith’s claim that her religious freedom was violated by the anti-discrimination law. This is unusual, for this court: since the Trump justices joined the court, turning it from what was already a quite conservative institution into a maximalist, revanchist one with a culture-war axe to grind, the court has expanded free-exercise-of-religion rights quite rapidly – at least, so long as those free-exercise rights are being exercised by conservative Christians.

The court has even specifically used the constitution’s free-exercise clause to imply an entitlement to discriminate against homosexuals: in last summer’s Fulton v Philadelphia, the justices ruled that municipal agencies handling the welfare of children in need were obliged to work with a religiously affiliated adoption agency, even though that agency discriminated against gay couples in violation of city civil rights law.

But in 303 Creative the court is only considering Smith’s wish to discriminate as a free speech issue. This opens a new avenue for challenges to civil rights law, and will provide an opportunity for rightwing lawyers to begin unraveling the laws regarding non-discrimination in public accommodations in the wake of the civil rights movement, like pulling on a loose thread to unravel a sweater.

Though Smith wants to discriminate only against gay couples, and other exemptions to civil rights law are likely to focus on allowing open bigotry against LGBTQ+ people to be expressed in commercial life, there is no limiting principle that means that only gay people will be targeted. After all, if a website designer is allowed to decline to make a gay wedding website, what stops her from making the same claim to refuse an interracial wedding, or an interfaith one? Is she allowed to decline to make sites for birth announcements of children born to gay couples, or via IVF?

I keep thinking of the sign that Smith wants to put at the top of her future business’s webpage, the one that says she won’t make websites for gay weddings. It’s essentially an advertisement of her belief in gay people’s inferiority, an effort to exclude them not just from her own goodwill, but from commercial life. How different is such a sign, really, from those that advertised whites-only lunch counters, or the signs that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recalled seeing in the windows of shops when she went on family road trips as a child: “No dogs and no Jews”.

It has become vogue, in rightwing legal arguments against civil rights law, to speak of the “indignity” imposed on anti-gay business owners who are forced to comply with anti-discrimination law. It’s a shame that the court doesn’t seem poised to consider the indignity of facing discrimination itself.

[yesyoubelonghere]

Gay Rights Ruling

Supreme Court Backs Web Designer Opposed to Same-Sex Marriage

The decision appeared to suggest that the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people, including to same-sex marriage, are on more vulnerable legal footing, particularly when they are at odds with claims of religious freedom.

Here’s what to know about the gay rights decision.

The Supreme Court on Friday sided with a web designer in Colorado who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to provide services for same-sex marriages despite a state law that forbids discrimination against gay people.

In a 6 to 3 vote, split along ideological lines, the court held that the First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion.

The case, though framed as a clash between free speech and gay rights, was the latest in a series of decisions in favor of religious people and groups, notably conservative Christians.

The decision also appeared to suggest that the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. people, including to same-sex marriage, are on more vulnerable legal footing, particularly when they are at odds with claims of religious freedom. At the same time, the ruling limited the ability of the governments to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

The designer, Lorie Smith, said her Christian faith requires her to turn away customers seeking wedding-related services to celebrate same-sex unions. She added that she intends to post a message saying the company’s policy is a product of her religious convictions.

A Colorado law forbids discrimination against gay people by businesses open to the public as well as statements announcing such discrimination. Ms. Smith, who has not begun the wedding business or posted the proposed statement for fear of running afoul of the law, sued to challenge it, saying it violated her rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion.

But when the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, 303 Creative L.L.C. v. Elenis, No. 21-476, it agreed to decide only one question: “whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment.”

Here’s what else to know:

The case, framed as a clash between free speech and gay rights, is the latest in a series of decisions in favor of religious people and groups, notably Christians.

Both sides have said that the consequences of the court’s ruling could be enormous, though for different reasons. Ms. Smith’s supporters said a decision for the state would allow the government to force all sorts of artists to state things at odds with their beliefs.

Her opponents said a ruling in her favor would blow a hole through anti-discrimination laws and allow businesses engaged in expression to refuse service to, for example, Black people or Muslims based on odious but sincerely held convictions.

The decision could affect how states enforce their anti-discrimination laws.

Lower courts have generally sided with gay and lesbian couples who were refused service by bakeries, florists and others, ruling that potential customers are entitled to equal treatment, at least in parts of the country with laws forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation.

This report is from the New York Times.

************

So, basically, the Supreme Court has said... You cannot discriminate against who someone is, but what they do. (???) If it involves YOUR artistic expression. (!!??)

The woman who brought up the case stated in an on air interview, she was fine with gay people. She just doesn't like what they do. What they do!? (LBGTQ+ do the same things as everyone else! They vote, have hobbies, go to work, go on vacation, pay taxes, have sex and get married etc... ) And by doing web site design for them is against her Christian beliefs and her First Amendment Rights as it involves her artistic expression. This woman had NOT been sued. She was trying to prevent her from being sued based on her religious beliefs as based on her First Amendment Rights.

Her Christian beliefs!? Sigh...

I feel, if she truly embraces being a "Christian" then she should embrace tolerance and let those she disagrees with, be "judged" after death, just as she will be "judged" after death.

It seems the First Amendment is being used as a shield to discriminate.

The Supreme Court has now opened Pandora's Box!

******

You may agree or disagree. But be respectful in your interaction.

I am a straight male.

[rapeculturerealities]

US Supreme Court hears arguments challenging LGBTQ rights law | LGBTQ News | Al Jazeera

On Monday, the justices heard more than two hours of spirited arguments in Denver-area business owner Lorie Smith’s appeal, which seeks an exemption from a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and other factors. Lower courts ruled in favour of Colorado.

Smith, who runs a web design business called 303 Creative, contends that Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act violates the right of artists – including web designers – to free speech under the US Constitution’s First Amendment by forcing them to express messages they oppose through their work.

Smith, 38, has said she believes marriage should be limited to opposite-sex couples, a view shared by many conservative Christians. She preemptively sued Colorado’s civil rights commission and other state officials in 2016 because she feared she would be punished for refusing to serve gay married couples.

While the conservative justices indicated support for Smith’s stance, the liberal justices leaned towards Colorado’s arguments. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.

[official-lorie-smith]

Hello, just a reminder that I refuse services to any same-sex couples!

Also, that guy in the Supreme Court case was gay, and was not straight. If he was straight, then I made up the case, and I obviously didn't!

[samijami]

Ey peeps send asks to @official-lorie-smith to get the account started off lol

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The case of an evangelical Christian designer from Colorado who refuses to build websites for same-sex couples lands in the U.S. Supreme Court Monday for oral arguments.

Why It Matters: For the second time in five years, a First Amendment case from Colorado pits religious freedom against the right of LGBTQ people to access services without discrimination, and puts the court in the middle of the nation's culture wars.

What To Know: Littleton's Lorie Smith, 38, objects to Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act, saying it violates her free speech rights because it forces her to publish messages she opposes, in this case celebrating same-sex marriage on a wedding website. She preemptively sued the state in 2019.

• The law bans businesses open to the public from denying goods or services based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and other characteristics.

What She's Saying: "Colorado is compelling and censoring my speech and forcing me to design and create custom artwork that celebrates messages that go against my deeply held beliefs," Smith told Reuters in a recent interview. "My faith is at the core of who I am."

Between The Lines: The Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 issued a divided ruling against Smith, siding with Colorado in deciding the law doesn't violate the First Amendment.

• Smith — backed by the conservative religious group Alliance Defending Freedom — appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Other Side: Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser says the nation's highest court has ruled in favor of state-level anti-discrimination laws and he will emphasize that precedent. The Biden administration and LGBTQ advocacy organizations are backing Colorado.

• “When a business says we're open to the public, that means they have to serve all members of the public," Weiser said in August, when he filed briefs with the court.

Flashback: In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who refused to make a cake for a gay couple. But the narrowly applied ruling avoided the broader question of whether businesses can discriminate and be protected by the First Amendment.

What's Next: A ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is expected by the end of June.

[queeryouthassemble]

[ID: A square Instagram post, split in half horizontally. The top half of the page has a red background, and displays a large, all-caps, white and dark gray heading reading "the Supreme Court rules in favor of anti LGBTQ+ web designer." The bottom of the page displays a photo of a pro-queer protest, featuring signs that read "religion doesn't excuse discrimination," "our rights are not up for debate," and "free speech is for everybody." End ID.]

[ID: A red square post, with an all-caps dark gray heading reading "let's talk about it..." smaller white text underneath reads "In December 2022, Lorie Smith, owner of 303 Creative LLC, went before the Supreme Court to ask if an artist can constitutionally be prohibited from discriminating against customers based on their sexual orientation. She claimed that the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Law* "forced her to create websites celebrating marriages that defy her belief that marriage should be reserved to unions between one man and one woman". On June 30, 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that the web designer's work is a form of artistic expression and that forcing her to create a website for a same-sex wedding violates her First Amendment rights in a 6-3 vote. *The Colorado Anti-Discrimination Law "prohibits all 'public accommodations' from denying 'the full and equal enjoyment' of its good and services to any customer based on his race, creed, disability, sexual orientation, or other statutorily enumerated trait." End ID.]

[ID: A red square post with an all-caps dark gray heading, that reads "this opens the door for discrimination against LGBTQ+ folks." Below that, white text reads "This not only creates pretext for other anti-discrimination laws nationwide to be challenged, but also allows businesses to deny customers who present themselves or identify as LGBTQ+. This decision sets a dangerous precedent and threatens decades of progress against LGBTQ+ rights." In the bottom left are two illustrated people, standing side-by-side, the one on the left holding a sign which reads "defend LGBTQ rights." End ID.]

[ID: A red square post with an all-caps dark gray heading reading "Queer Youth Assemble's Statement:" Smaller white text underneath reads "We at QYA are sickened and disappointed by the Supreme Court’s ruling. “We the people of the United States” should refer to all people, not a select few privileged by the nine individuals on the bench. We will continue our fight to protect the queer community across the country and amplify the voices of those impacted by this ruling. Discrimination has detrimental long-term impacts; as evidenced by the restrictions and discrimination following Black Wall Street, discrimination in all forms has a lasting impact on a community when it comes to resources including housing, finances, education, and access to opportunities of all manner." End ID.]

[ID: A red square post with an all-caps dark gray heading reading "continued..." smaller white text underneath reads "Queer Youth Assemble is committed to providing the resources LGBTQIA+ youth need to thrive in the face of injustice and discrimination. Stay safe, stay strong, and stay proud." An illustrated person at the bottom holds a sign that says "queer people will not be erased." End ID.]

[ID: A red square post with an all-caps dark gray heading which reads "what can I do?" Smaller white text underneath reads "1. ORGANIZE AND ATTEND PROTESTS If you are interested in taking direct action in the form of organizing a protest or demonstration related to the new legal precedent set by this case, contact QYA's Head of Policy, Faith, at faithc@queeryouthassemble.org 2. EDUCATE If it is safe to do so, inform your family and community on what is happening to the queer community, and educate those around you, helping them to to be better allies, and more aware of the severity of this ruling. 3. REACH OUT TO QUEER ORGANIZATIONS Contact your local LGBTQIA+ organizations/centers and ask them to organize events to raise awareness about the SCOTUS decision." End ID.]

[ID: A red square post with an all-caps dark gray heading that reads "where can I donate?" Below that, smaller white text reads "1. LAMBDA LEGAL https://support.lambdalegal.org/site/SPageNavigator/donateApplePay.html 2. ACLU https://action.aclu.org/give/now? 3. Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund https://transgenderlegal.org/support-us/ 4. THE LGBTQ+ BAR https://lgbtbar.site-ym.com/donations /default.asp" An illustrated person in the bottom right corner holds a sign that reads "support queer causes." End ID.]

[ID: A red square post, with an all-caps dark gray heading that reads "sources." Below that are two columns of sources. The left column reads, from top to bottom, "AMERICAN PROGRESS https://www.americanprogress.org/article/widespread-discrimination-continues-shape-lgbt-peoples-lives-subtle-significant-ways/ SUPREME COURT https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-476_c185.pdf LAWYERS COMMITTEE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS https://www.lawyerscommittee.org/lawyers-committee-for-civil-rights-under-law-condemns-supreme-courts-harmful-ruling-in-303-creative-llc-v-elenis/" The right column, from top to bottom, reads "Statement from President Joe Biden https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/06/30/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-supreme-court-decision-in-303-creative-llc-v-elenis/ GLAD https://www.glad.org/statement-on-supreme-court-ruling-in-303-creative-v-elenis/" End ID.]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Joe Heller

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 30, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 30, 2023

Today the Supreme Court followed up on yesterday’s decision gutting affirmative action with three decisions that will continue to push the United States back to the era before the New Deal.

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis the court said that the First Amendment protects website designer Lorie Smith from having to use words she doesn’t believe in support of gay marriage. To get there, the court focused on the marriage website designer’s contention that while she is willing to work with LGBTQ customers, she doesn’t want to use her own words on a personalized website to celebrate gay marriages. Because of that unwillingness, she said, she wants to post on her website that she will not make websites for same-sex weddings. She says she is afraid that in doing so, she will run afoul of Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws, which prevent public businesses from discriminating against certain groups of people. 

This whole scenario of being is prospective, by the way: her online business did not exist and no one had complained about it. Smith claims she wants to start the business because “God is calling her ‘to explain His true story about marriage.’” She alleges that in 2016, a gay man approached her to make a website for his upcoming wedding, but yesterday, Melissa Gira Grant of The New Republic reported that, while the man allegedly behind the email does exist, he is an established designer himself (so why would he hire someone who was not?), is not gay, and married his wife 15 years ago. He says he never wrote to Smith, and the stamp on court filings shows she received it the day after she filed the suit.

Despite this history, by a 6–3 vote, the court said that Smith was being hurt by the state law and thus had standing to sue. It decided that requiring the designer to use her own words to support gay marriage violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. 

Taken together with yesterday’s decision ruling that universities cannot consider race as a category in student admissions, the Supreme Court has highlighted a central contradiction in its interpretation of government power: if the Fourteenth Amendment limits the federal government to making sure that there is no discrimination in the United States on the basis of race—the so-called “colorblind” Constitution—as the right-wing justices argued yesterday, it is up to the states to make sure that state laws don’t discriminate against minorities. But that requires either protecting voting rights or accepting minority rule.

This problem has been with us since before the Civil War, when lawmakers in the southern states defended their enslavement of their Black (and Indigenous) neighbors by arguing that true democracy was up to the voters and that those voters had chosen to support enslavement. After the Civil War, most lawmakers didn’t worry too much about states reimposing discriminatory laws because they included Black men as voters first in 1867 with the Military Reconstruction Act and then in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and they believed such political power would enable Black men to shape the laws under which they lived. 

But in 1875 the Supreme Court ruled in Minor v. Happersett that it was legal to cut citizens out of the vote so long as the criteria were not about race. States excluded women, who brought the case, and southern states promptly excluded Black men through literacy clauses, poll taxes, and so on. Northern states mirrored southern laws with their own, designed to keep immigrants from exercising a voice in state governments. At the same time, southern states protected white men from the effects of these exclusionary laws with so-called grandfather clauses, which said a man could vote so long as his grandfather had been eligible.

It turned out that limiting the Fourteenth Amendment to questions of race and letting states choose their voters cemented the power of a minority. The abandonment of federal protection for voting enabled white southerners to abandon democracy and set up a one-party state that kept Black and Brown Americans as well as white women subservient to white men. As in all one-party states, there was little oversight of corruption and no guarantee that laws would be enforced, leaving minorities and women at the mercy of a legal system that often looked the other way when white criminals committed rape and murder. 

Many Americans tut-tutted about lynching and the cordons around Black life, but industrialists insisted on keeping the federal government small because they wanted to make sure it could not regulate their businesses or tax them. They liked keeping power at the state level; state governments were far easier to dominate. Southerners understood that overlap: when a group of southern lawmakers in 1890 wrote a defense of the South’s refusal to let Black men vote, they “respectfully dedicated” the book to “the business men of the North.” 

In the 1930s the Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt undermined this coalition by using the federal government to regulate business and provide a social safety net. In the 1940s and 1950s, as racial and gender atrocities began to highlight in popular media just how discriminatory state laws really were, the Supreme Court went further, recognizing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s declaration that states could not deprive any person of the equal protection of the laws meant that the federal government must protect the rights of minorities when states would not. Those rules created modern America.

This is what the radical right seeks to overturn. Yesterday the Supreme Court said that the Fourteenth Amendment could not address racial disparities, but today, like lawmakers in the 1870s, it signaled that it would not protect voting in the states either. It rejected a petition for a review of Mississippi’s strict provision for taking the vote away from felons. That law illustrates just how fully we’re reliving our history: it dates from the 1890 Mississippi constitution that cemented power in white hands. Black Mississippians are currently 2.7 times more likely than white Mississippians to lose the right to vote under the law. 

The court went even further today than allowing states to choose their voters. It said that even if state voters do call for minority protections, as Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws do, states cannot protect minorities in the face of someone’s religious beliefs. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that for “the first time in its history,” the court has granted “a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.” 

It is worth noting that segregation was defended as a deeply held religious belief. 

Today, using a case concerning school loans, the Supreme Court also took aim at the power of the federal government to regulate business. In Biden v. Nebraska the court declared by a vote of 6 to 3 that President Biden’s loan forgiveness program, which offered to forgive up to $20,000 of federally held student debt, was unconstitutional. The right-wing majority of the court argued that Congress had not intended to give that much power to the executive branch, although the forgiveness plan was based on law that gave the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs…as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a…national emergency…to ensure” that “recipients of student financial assistance…are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance because of [the national emergency]”.

The right-wing majority based its decision on the so-called major questions doctrine, invented to claw back regulatory power from the federal government. By saying that Congress cannot delegate significant decisions to federal agencies, which are in the executive branch, the court takes on itself the power to decide what a “significant” decision is. The court established this new doctrine in the West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency case, stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate certain kinds of air pollution.

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” constitutional analyst Ian Millhiser wrote today in Vox, today’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska “is complete and utter nonsense. It rewrites a federal law which explicitly authorizes the loan forgiveness program, and it relies on a fake legal doctrine known as ‘major questions’ which has no basis in any law or any provision of the Constitution.”

Today’s Supreme Court, packed as it has been by right-wing money behind the Federalist Society and that society’s leader, Leonard Leo, is taking upon itself power over the federal government and the state governments to recreate the world that existed before the New Deal.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called out the lurch toward turning the government over to the wealthy, supported as it is by religious footsoldiers like Lorie Smith: “Today, the court substituted itself for Congress,” Cardona told reporters. “It’s outrageous to me that Republicans in Congress and state offices fought so hard against a program that would have helped millions of their own constituents. They had no problem handing trillion-dollar tax cuts to big corporations and the super wealthy.” 

Cardona made his point personal: “And many had no problems accepting millions of dollars in forgiven pandemic loans, like Senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma had more than $1.4 million in pandemic loans forgiven. He represents 489,000 eligible borrowers that were turned down today. Representative Brett Guthrie from Kentucky had more than $4.4 million forgiven. He represents more than 90,000 eligible borrowers who were turned down today. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia had more than $180,000 forgiven. She represents more than 91,800 eligible borrowers who were turned down today.” 

In the majority opinion of Biden v. Nebraska, Chief Justice John Roberts lamented that those who dislike the court’s decisions have accused the court of “going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” He defended the court’s decision and urged those who disagreed with it not to disparage the court because “such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.” But what is at stake is not simply these individual decisions, whether or not you agree with them; at stake is the way our democracy operates.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute didn’t offer much hope for Roberts’s plea. “It is not just the rulings the Roberts Court is making,” he tweeted. “They created out of [w]hole cloth a bogus, major questions doctrine. They made a mockery of standing. They rewrite laws to fit their radical ideological preferences. They have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”

In a shot across the bow of this radical court, in her dissent to Biden v. Nebraska, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[bizarrobrain]

Extremist religious organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom (a mainly anti-abortion/anti-LGBTQIA+ group Amy Coney Barrett has ties to) are working double-time to roll back protections that prevent people like them from discriminating against LGBTQIA+ people in the workplace and in places of business. Establishments/public services have even more legal standing to refuse service to someone who isn’t behaving inappropriately because the ADF ran Lorie Smith, a Colorado web-designer (she owns a WordPress blog) who lied about a gay couple contacting her about making a website. The man listed is straight, married to a woman and didn’t even know his name was attached to the legal briefing until recently. The other man in the “couple” is fictional. The ADF and the SCOTUS knowingly let her say this guy was gay in front of the whole country. How is that not perjury? How is there so little pushback? It’s just...oh that’s a thing now. And not something that opens us up to more abuses? It’s cool and totally not alarming that our laws are based on whatever made up, uninformed, lizard brain gut impulse disgust reaction zips through some evangelical weirdo brain on any given day.

[samgridley]

Civil Rights vs. Religion

Civil Rights vs. Religion

The controversy caused by Lorie Smith, an anti-gay Colorado website designer, has prompted me to think through my position on the issues she raises—issues that pit her religious beliefs against the rights of her (hypothetical) customers. Some of my liberal friends, predictably, have lined up against her. Though I’m way-left on the political spectrum, I don’t find the matter so simple. To review…