Gay Twitter™ swings back hard against SCOTUS’s latest attempt to strip away our rights
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that it's effectively legal for private business to refuse service to LGBTQ+ people.
To cap off Pride Month, the Supreme Court ruled Friday that private businesses have a right to deny LGBTQ+ people goods and services. And unsurprisingly, LGBTQ+ folx across the country aren’t happy about it.
In a 6 to 3 vote among ideological lines, the uber-conservative court sided with a Colorado web designer who says her Christian faith requires her to turn away same-sex couples looking for wedding-related services to celebrate their marriage.
Though Colorado state law prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, the designer, Lorie Smith, says the non-discrimination statute violates her right to free speech.
When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, it set out to rule on whether applying a “public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump‘s first Supreme Court appointee, authored the majority opinion. “The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands,” he wrote. “Colorado seeks to deny that promise.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayer, meanwhile, authored the dissent. “Today the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class,” she wrote.
The court’s decision Friday comes five years after it narrowly ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple.
These rulings suggest the rights of LGBTQ+ people, including to same-sex marriage, are now on more tenuous legal footing than before.
Making matters more enraging, Smith, the web designer, hasn’t even started her business yet. The Supreme Court took a wrecking ball to anti-discrimination protections based on a hypothetical scenario. (And girl, no gay wants to visit your crappy website, anyway.)
Friday represented a horrific one-two punch for our loathsome court. Earlier in the morning, the six right-wing justices also struck down President Biden’s plan to wipe away $400 billion in student loan debt.
When same-sex marriage was declared legal in all 50 states, it was viewed as a watershed moment in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality. But in just eight short years, a lot of that precedent is being destroyed. When the court struck down Roe last summer, it opened the legal door to strike down marriage equality.
In fact, Justice Clarence Thomas specified mentioned Obergefell as one of the rulings that should be reconsidered.
The Supreme Court hasn’t gone that far yet, but the ground may be getting laid.
Scroll down for more outrage at the court’s latest ignominious ruling…
There is literally no practical way for the court to distinguish the difference between saying “I won’t design a site for gay couples” and “I don’t design a site for interracial couple.” This opens the door to legal racial discrimination.— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) June 30, 2023
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