Yeah. It may be a hijack to be discussing this in a thread titled “Religious Accommodations.” From the article, it looks to me like this is being argued on the grounds of freedom of speech and has nothing to do with the kind of religious accommodations that this thread was originally about.
Yes - but just because 60% (for example) of the employees can claim some variety of Christian religion and demand Sunday off doesn’t mean anywhere near that many will . For starters, not everyone who can claim some variety of Christian is all that observant and not every variety of Christianity forbids all work on Sundays. I have spent a good part of my life in jobs where people work Sundays ( and Saturdays and nights and evenings) and there have always been plenty of nominally Christian people who were willing to or even preferred working Sunday. In some cases because Sunday got them premium pay , but in other cases because the nature of their job meant they would have either Saturday or Sunday off but not both and they preferred Saturday. I’m not saying it won’t ever be a problem, just that I don’t think it will result in a Hobby Lobby/Chick Fil A sort of world.
So how does this not allow the return of sundown towns if, say, a community of conservatives who run businesses in a small town want to deny services to all LGBTQ+ travelers?
As far as I can tell, the decision is based on First Amendment grounds - and many businesses don’t involve expression or anything that can even be argued to be expression. Maybe a caterer is expressing something by catering a same-sex wedding but a supermarket isn’t expressing anything by selling groceries to a gay person. There’s a reason all of these cases involve wedding services and not refusing to sell birthday cakes to LGBTQ+ people or catering a retirement party honoring/hosted by LGBTQ+ people.
From the opinion.
"Through her business, 303 Creative LLC, Lorie Smith offers website and graphic design, marketing advice, and social media management services. Recently, she decided to expand her offerings to include services for couples seeking websites for their weddings. As she envisions it, her websites will provide couples with text, graphic arts, and videos to “celebrate” and “conve[y]” the “details” of their “unique love story.”
"While Ms. Smith has laid the groundwork for her new venture, she has yet to carry out her plans. She worries that, if she does so, Colorado will force her to express views with which she disagrees. …
Specifically, she worries that, if she enters the wedding website business, the State will force her to convey messages inconsistent with her belief that marriage should be
reserved to unions between one man and one woman. Ms. Smith acknowledges that
her views about marriage may not be popular in all quarters. But, she asserts, the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause protects her from being compelled to speak what she does not believe. The Constitution, she insists, protects her right to differ. {insert derisive snort here for Gorsuch’s blatant victimization creation of “right to differ” as opposed to “right to hate gay people”}."
and, the money shot on the standing issue:
"For its part, the Tenth Circuit held that Ms. Smith had standing to sue. In that court’s
judgment, she had established a credible threat that, if she follows through on her plans to offer wedding website services, Colorado will invoke CADA to force her to create
speech she does not believe or endorse. The court pointed to the fact that “Colorado has a history of past enforcement against nearly identical conduct—i.e., Masterpiece Cakeshop”; that anyone in the State may file a complaint against Ms. Smith and initiate “a potentially burdensome administrative hearing” process; and that “Colorado [has] decline[d] to disavow future enforcement” proceedings against her. Id., at 1174. Before us, no party challenges these conclusions."
Of course this opinion is authored by Gorsuch who, in the coach/school prayer case blatantly lied about the facts of the case, so take his factual findings to be close to worthless.
I wonder if Ms. Smith would bake a cake for a Commandment breaker?
What am I thinking, those rules don’t seem to ever count.
Lori Smith does graphic design and was thinking about maybe, sometime in the future, possibly, maybe doing marriage websites. She’s a bigot.
Jack Phillips is a baker who refused to make cakes for LGBTQ+ patrons. He’s also a bigot.
But they’re two different bigots.
The local diner is going to be hard pressed to argue that being forced to serve black people is tantamount to the government dictating their speech.
Yes, and we can say the same thing about ordering ‘Wedding Cake #7’ from the catalog.
What about the chef in the back? Each hash brown patty is hand crafted…
Like, for instance, a bakery that offers a selection of standardized cakes available to anyone for purchase.
Provided your not purchasing that generic cake for gay purposes.
I once saw a piece of toast with the image of Jesus on it, so you might be on to something.
Look, I don’t think that making any standardized cake is expression - I don’t even think a fair amount of customized cakes constitute expression. But I do think that arguing that a cake for a same sex wedding is compelled speech is very different from arguing that selling a pair of pants is compelled speech.
If a cake can be “speech,” I’m hard pressed to see an argument for why a ham sandwich isn’t.
Pork is a sin!
And someone actually asked Jack Smith to bake a cake for a same sex marriage. I think he was wrong, but at least he had a reason to feel the law was compelling him in some way.
The web designer is a bigot who is abusing the court system so she can prance around proclaiming her bigotry. I’m really upset that the courts let her do that. I great they are just looking for excuses to rule against gays.
Agree. The whole complaint was flimsy to start with, but the RWNJs found an ember here to build this up to the SC to further their cause against gay Americans.
As bigoted as Smith is, and as obvious the right wing of Scotus’s reaching for a case to get the result they wanted, there is, to my mind, a relatively debatable issue in the case: How much can anti-discrimination laws applied to “public accommodations” infringe on a person’s right to be a bigot? The majority seems to think that the First Amendment limits a government’s power to enact anti-discrimination laws if the service being offered is “expressive speech”. The dissent disagrees, mostly because whatever minimal “expressive speech” is made in creating a website is commercial in nature, and the regulation at question is content-neutral.
There is a debate to be had about exactly where the line is when balancing an individual’s right to be a bigot and government’s power to enact anti-discrimination laws. Much of the debate was had after the Civil Rights Act was constantly challenged by bigots. The Supreme Court consistently rejected the idea that an individual’s rights to free association, personal beliefs, and religious liberty can trump anti-discrimination laws in public accommodations. The majority here thinks otherwise.