Well, it looks like if you run a business, it’s A-okay to discriminate against certain customers based on your religious beliefs…
Do they address any standing issue? My understanding is that the web designer hadn’t actually been harmed.
As I see it, the tricky part is: are they discriminating against the customers or against the messages?
If you’re a web designer and I’m a Nazi, it’s one thing for you to refuse to design a web site for me to show off my Beanie Baby collection, but it’s another for you to refuse to design a web site for me to spread my white supremacist beliefs. IMHO.
(In case it needs to be said: this is a hypothetical. I am not really a Nazi.)
In this case, since the designer wasn’t asked to create any specific message, definitely against the customers.
BTW, this was the same with the Colorado baker – the gay couple that wanted the cake just wanted an off-the-shelf design, but the baker didn’t want to be seen as somehow supporting gay marriage.
I’m hoping, but I’m sure I’ll be disappointed, that this won’t get into the same design vs. customer conversation that somehow these discussions always devolve into. No one is saying that a web designer has to agree to use Nazi imagery and make a Nazi website.
And, especially in this case where no one asked for any design, there was no request for rainbows (shudder!) or other scary LGBTQ+ imagery.
I don’t understand why the web designer or the baker couldn’t just politely decline to take the job. No one was going to force them to put rainbows on web pages or cakes. If they don’t want to serve gay people - “Oh, I am too busy right now and I cannot take any more jobs. Sorry!” and leave it at that. Why’d this have to go to the SC and make it the law of the land now? Now any business owner can refuse to serve anyone for any reason, including “I don’t like those people” and hide behind their 1A rights under the constitution.
I could imagine a sting operation where a web designer repeated turns down gay marriages (too busy…) but accepts straight marriage requests, and then gets sued. ETA: I think this was done in the real estate space to point out racism in renting and selling.
In this case, the case was pre-emptive.
You don’t understand why . . . but you stated the reason clearly!
The Reuters article makes it sound like this was a pre-emptive case - that she raised a lawsuit to ensure she wouldn’t have to design websites for gay weddings, rather than her suffering the consequences for refusing to do so. If that’s accurate, I’m surprised the Supreme Court chose to hear a speculative case.
Still, I think the court is right that she has a free speech argument. If she’s selling a website template where the user provides all the content, enters their credit card and presses the purchase button, and the website is automatically generated, then she would be in violation of the Colorado anti-discriminatory laws, But if she’s creating content, then the government shouldn’t have the ability to compel her to create the content.
It’s not religious accommodation either. The Supreme Court isn’t saying that it’s okay for her not to create websites for gay weddings, but it wouldn’t be okay for an atheist to do so. The court is saying that no-one should be compelled by the government to make an expression that falls outside their set of beliefs. To make a comparison, an atheist web designer would be totally within his rights to refuse to design church websites, even though it’s ostensibly religious discrimination.
I think this is false. They’re saying that you can’t force religious people to express things against their religion, within the bounds of other constitutional protections. Atheists may or may not have such protection, but they couldn’t discriminate against religions. So, a Christian website designer couldn’t close their business to Black people or Jewish people, but LGBTQ+ may be discriminated against.
I’m wondering the same thing. Apparently she had not yet started the business.
Me, three. It’s hard to see how she was harmed, and I’m really pissed that the courts were willing to hear her case.
Clearly, the point was that they were anxious to rule that:
Eh, not really. Minority religions can be much easier to accommodate than majorities. If I have a business with 100 employees that I want to keep open 24/7, it’s going to be a lot easier to find someone to cover the Saturday shift in place of the one Jew than to find someone to cover the Sunday shift in place of the 99 Christians.
What strikes me about this Supreme Court decision is that it doesn’t really settle anything (and in fact, unsettles a lot). We’ve now had a whole bunch of cases on just what is or isn’t a de minimus accommodation. If a company isn’t sure what they need to do, they can ask their legal team “Is this accommodation de minimus?”, and their legal team can look through all that case law and compare it to the various cases, and come up with a confident answer. But with a new standard, now we have to go through the whole process again, for many, many cases, to decide whether any given accommodation counts as “undue hardship”. Heck, it might even be weaker, in some regards: Whether a hardship is “due” is not necessarily related to whether it’s “minimal”.
What do we know about the person who wanted the website in the first place?
It’s a horseshit ruling perpetrated by bigots and zealots who have too much power. A total end-run around the concept of protected classes. Using their twisted argument about religious convictions, what’s to stop that same web creator from stating that she is of the religious belief that black and white should not intermarry and refuses to “create” for such a couple. Or the snooty restaurant whose chef will declare I can’t prepare special meals for couples of color?
This country has just gone down the toilet.
With this post, you’ve replaced Bwana Beast as my favorite Bwana.
That they may not even exist
I disagree with your statement. I’m basing my disagreement on these sentences in the Reuters article:
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the ruling that Colorado’s law would force Smith to create speech that she does not believe, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
“Were the rule otherwise, the better the artist, the finer the writer, the more unique his talent, the more easily his voice could be conscripted to disseminate the government’s preferred messages. That would not respect the First Amendment; more nearly, it would spell its demise,” Gorsuch wrote.
That seems to me to protect free speech for all sides. So focusing on religion, if a feminist web designer refused to work on Southern Baptist church websites, she’d be free to do so. Or, from the other end of the spectrum, if a white supremacist refused to design a website for the NAACP, she’d be free to do so. The message from the ruling is that free speech constitutional protections mean that the government cannot compel expression that people disagree with. It doesn’t matter what that expression is, and whether the government likes it or not, nor whether the person being asked to make the expression is religious or otherwise.
So the case may have been based on false information, meaning she actually had no standing…and there is no way to appeal? Was any of this brought up in court?
May?
When Smith and her attorneys, the Christian right group Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, brought this case for the first time, it was to the United States District Court in Colorado in 2016, and they lost. Smith and ADF filed the case on September 20 of that year, asking the court to enjoin the state anti-discrimination law so that Smith could begin offering her wedding website design services to straight couples only. Up to this point, Smith had never designed any wedding website. (In fact, her website six months prior to the lawsuit being filed in 2016 does not include any of the Christian messaging that it did shortly afterward and today, archived versions of the site show.) The initial lawsuit did not mention the “Stewart” inquiry, which was submitted to Smith’s website on September 21, according to the date-stamp shown in later court filings, indicating that she received it the day after the suit was originally filed.