Supreme Court rules in favor of Christian designer in gay wedding website case | The Hill:
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that Colorado cannot require an evangelical Christian web designer to provide same-sex wedding websites.
The court found that the state’s anti-discrimination law violates Lorie Smith’s free speech rights under the First Amendment by demanding she creates same-sex wedding websites if she wants to do so for opposite-sex unions. Smith argued the requirement violated her religious beliefs.
Honestly, I have to ask–setting aside all other arguments–why in the name of Hell would you want to engage the services of someone you find openly hostile to your point of view to work on something as “expressive” as a web site?
I can only come up with two answers.
- There is a monopoly in your state where the only providers available are hostile to your point of view.
- You’re trying to put people who are hostile to your point of view out of business.
Now the first makes sense if you’re trying to do business with a large faceless corporation or one with a virtual monopoly–like Amazon. And note Amazon can wield a lot of power to restrict one’s expression–even in error. In such a case, I can see wanting to revisit the Supreme Court ruling, as you don’t have a reasonable alternative.
On the other hand, “expressive businesses” like “web site developer” and “cake baker” are a dime a fucking dozen. Meaning if the person you’re talking to dislikes your point of view–because you’re gay, you’re Wiccan, you’re a Christian evangelical trying to get a religious web site off the ground and you’re going to an LGBT+ web site designer trying to force them to post pages about the sinfulness of the LGBT lifestyle–you can always go somewhere else.
(And yes, Colorado’s law opens the last possibility: religiious belief is a protected class in business transactions, so in theory discriminating against a customer for their religious viewpoint is illegal under the prior interpretation of Colorado’s law. And yes, it does reveal the hypocrisy of such laws, if we can envision putting a web site developer out of business for not wanting to put up an LGBT page–but not doing the same to an LGBT web site developer for failing to put up web pages for an evangelical preaching the sins of the gay lifestyle. And if you think “religion” falls below “LGBT” concerns–then where does a Wiccan stand in this hierarchy?)
Because they are a dime a dozen, honestly the only reason why I can see groups in Colorado using the protected status of LGBT individuals is door number 2 above: armed with the legal tools at their disposal, they were deliberately targeting businesses run by Christian evangelicals, for the explicit purpose of putting them out of business.
And that’s not a habit you want to be in, because quite simply–and we already see this with cancel culture–you may be higher on the “victimization totem pole” than the next guy, but you may not be high enough to save your own ass from the next guy to come along.
Given the penchant for “bi-erasure” within the LGBT community–that is, the penchent for lesbians and gay people to consider bisexuals as either “tourists” or “too weak to admit to themselves their homosexuality”–it’s not hard to see an LGBT business being attacked using the exact same Colorado toolset when the more outspoken lesbian or gay owners are “forced” to put together a page attacking bi-erasure.
That’s the beauty of the Supreme Court ruling, by the way: we are forced to acknowledge we don’t all have to agree with each other, to leave each other alone and to try to get along.
That is, we don’t have to be constantly trying to destroy the people we disagree with by using the legal system to destroy the livelihoods of people who hold beliefs we dislike.