Supreme Court Rules Web Designer Can Refuse Work on Same-Sex Wedding Announcemen
wsj.com
wsj.com
That Stewart isn't the one who filed the lawsuit has nothing to do with this. Smith sought clarity for what the Colorado law required, and it escalated to the Supreme Court. Smith's inquiry is also entirely reasonable, given the precedent set with Masterpiece. I'm not sure what TNR thinks it's proving with their article.
So is she going to be prosecuted for perjury?
(No, in the actual context, I don't think this ruling is very sensible.)
Also funny how the COVID vaccine card thing never seemed to pan out anyway. I can't remember the last time someone asked me for proof of vaccination...
But COVID-19 wasn’t endemic at the time that proof-of-vaccination requirements were commonplace. An endemic infectious disease has stable low-level incidence within a defined population. Nothing about the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when such restrictions were in place fits that description.
In any case, I was asked many times for proof of vaccination; but I don’t live in the U.S. so possibly the implementation compliance differed.
Should it be considered illegal discrimination to not allow drunks to drive? Should it be considered illegal discrimination to not allow someone with HIV from donating blood? Should it be considered illegal discrimination for a hospital to require licensed doctors?
The path arriving to the outcomes is different, but the outcomes are the same. My question is what, exactly, is the distinction because I struggle to see one.
More concretely, if someone took a COVID vaccine and had a terrible allergic reaction, doctors will strongly advise against further vaccination. Should that person's immutable physical traits justify discrimination against them?
Are there safety concerns? then yes.
We don't let people with epilepsy drive, despite that being an immutable characteristic.
If this particular web design business is a few people and they are all individually refusing to do a certain job, then I'd say this is pretty sensible decision. Whereas if this is a business with many employees (some who likely would do the job), then it would have been sensible to prevent the owners/managers from imposing their personal whims onto the whole group.
When I said "our society" needs to recover it, I mean the legal system as well. As things stand, I can imagine Walmart in court a decade from now arguing that their desire to discriminate is really just a manifestation of the Waltons' individual liberty. Concretely, Citizens United was straight up wrong - a business entity formed by government charter is decidedly not the same as an unincorporated group of people, nor does it preclude the individuals comprising that business from exercising their rights individually apart from that entity. Yet here we are.
Perhaps the way you are framing it is providing a lot of the shock. We can position anything as "the only correct opinion to hold" through effective framing. Hence why things eventually end up in SC.
The reason it's disturbing to me is that the supreme court is the last resort. In order for a case to get there, someone very powerful needs to really insist that you can or can't or must do the thing, whatever that may be.
There was a famous case where a guy appealed a parking ticket all the way: the court declined to hear the case, but did write a per curiam scolding him for wasting their time.
Here, the underlying claim was paper-thin and apparently fake, but the appeals present interesting legal issues.
But that is what underpins the concept of business.
A set of restrictions on what activities a business can do and how they interact with society.
To get shocked when society wants to prevent discrimination seems odd.
That reads to me as "I don't think laws are fair and people should be able to do whatever they want to do."
I don't want to pay taxes, I don't want to pay my bills, and I don't want to have to wait to be sober to drive, but I do it all anyways because the law compels me.
I appreciate that physically hurting is not appropriate in your law, but it should be your right to hurt others in any non-physical manner if you feel like it, no limits.
Dropping concrete limitations to the scope of law opens it up too anything. What is non-physical harm? What if turning down someone's sexual advances hurts their self-esteem? What if refusing to work for me hurts my ability to make a living.
The point is that once you abandon a concrete definition of harm, your punished into a world of capricious law what's the times to regulate every individual Behavior on a Case by case basis.
Consider a case in which a majority of society excludes a minority from most commerce. Are ghettos, ‘separate but equal,’ and whites-only fountains not worth preventing?
The government is not telling you to sell cakes on your day off; it's saying that as long as you're already selling cakes for the public, you can't be a bigot and discriminate.
Imagine a town square with spaces for market stalls. There are limited spaces. Thus if you take one, you are preventing someone else from taking one. They are public property and thus the public has a right to set terms for the business you conduct there.
Now that analogy holds for other kinds of business too. Even if you "own" the building that your bar is in, you never really fully own real estate in most countries. There are limits on what you can use it for because it's connected (physically) to the rest of the world which belongs to other people.
In contrast, my expectation is that I do fully own my brain and my thoughts and my attention and my intellectual output, and it's extremely disturbing to me that anyone thinks they should be able to compel me to devote those things to their purposes.
The bar is welcome to serve whatever beer they want, if you come in and ask for a specific brand they can refuse service because they don't stock it.
I would argue it would be akin to walking into a bar and saying I am racist because I only sell brand X and you demand I buy brand Y just for you.
Let me try to make the point in a another way.
Let's say a gay person asks her to create a website for their friends "normal" marriage, she is fine with it and takes their money. She didn't discriminate against their sexuality, she rendered the service to a gay person just fine, the difference is the product.
Now let's flip it, a straight person askes her to create a website for their gay friends wedding. She now has refused service based on the product sold.
The question the court needs to answer where is the line drawn, they have chosen it. Religion is also protected, racism has no religious base, what is deemed marriage is.
The argument to be made is that she does not believe that marriage between gay people is right and she refused service on those grounds, whether asked by either sexuality.
This is all hypothetical but the point is the argument isn't trivial, how you frame it makes a big difference.
And yet, religion was touted for many years in this country as a justification for horrific racial discrimination.
The big issue here is that the court has declared that some classes are more protected than others, which will allow discrimination to flourish. They haven’t struck the right balance with this ruling.
Maybe if I read the court documents it states that but from the article I don't see that.
I know a white supremacist, overtly fascist (that is otherwise a fine friend) who has a black great grandfather. He'd be considered black in the US.
The SC ruling says that if you have a sincerely held belief the black people are evil you can refuse to serve black people.
Or you can refuse to serve any group if you have a sincere belief against them: different ethnic groups, different religions, different versions of the same religion, gender, etc.
We have a right to choose who we work for. If an evangelical doesn't want to do wedding services for LGBT folks, realize that the street goes both ways.
Would you want to design something for a conservative that wants a God, hunting, and football themed wedding cake? What if, perhaps as a joke or perhaps in serious earnestness, they put Ephesians 5:22-33 on their registry?
If you did web design consultancy, would you take on a Republican political candidate as a client? What if their website espouses gun rights and is anti-abortion?
By your line of reasoning a doctor could refuse to treat you because they don't agree with your "lifestyle". This isn't hypothetical: it was a widespread approach of doctors for decades.
It's truly amazing how conservatives will argue refusing to serve a nazi because of their beliefs is an assault on freedom but also demand the right to deny service to people simply because they exist.
The continuing challenge is what is a right and what is protected free action for an individual, and when an individual is acting as a representative of a corporation, what should change?
I think these are very important questions. The power that the decision has at scale (individual, corporation, government) is relevant.
Suppose a gay web designer gets offered a deal to design a website for a notoriously anti-LGBT church…they should be allowed to say no because it conflicts with their values. Pretty sure they’ll find another designer willing to do it.
Sexual orientation is a protected class of people under the law, not being a bigot against minorities.
But in the more immediate term, I fear for what will happen as traditional restaurants turn their existing biases against serving black people (who are sterotypically labeled as poor patrons) into bans. I don't think this will end peacefully.
But I understand what you’re saying.
https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-...
> Maybe it should not be a surprise, though, that this strange fake “request” popped up in a case in which the plaintiff’s main argument rested on the claim that someday, out there, a same-sex couple would want her to design a wedding website. The closest thing Smith had to an actual inquiry—the nonwedding of Stewart and Mike—arrived within 24 hours of her having filed a suit in which said inquiry would be potentially a helpful piece of supporting evidence. The inquiry floats through the filings only later, and still it remains. Despite the district court raising doubts about it representing a genuine inquiry from two men getting married—and the court didn’t even raise the real doubt that the couple does not exist—it is now part of the case history, a bit of fan fiction joining the other phantom gays the case invokes. ADF made no mention of Stewart and Mike specifically in their arguments before the Supreme Court this session, but they don’t need to: Their entire case, after all, is built around the idea of gay people doing something that they have not yet done, nor ever will do.
If you were a McDonalds of websites, and any person could walk in and order a stock website it would be a different matter entirely. To refuse to sell an item off of your shelf to a customer based on sex/religion/skin-color/etc would be entirely wrong, but to refuse to enter a contractual agreement with someone to create a bespoke thing seems different.
Then again, I may be some sort of terrible despicable bigot, because I've turned down *EVERY* contract to write PERL that I've ever been offered, so maybe I'm just a warped individual.
Yup. The key word here is “projects”.
The web designer technically isn’t turning down the client they’re turning down the project. It’s an important distinction.
So yes they did commit perjury, and the Supreme Court said "who cares, our goal is to make it illegal to be gay again"