The dissent in Friday’s Supreme Court ruling that declared the leftist officials in the state of Colorado were not allowed to ordered a web designer to violate her Christian faith with her work is drawing attention.
For it’s conflation of LGBT ideology with civil rights fights that the nation had over rights for blacks and for women.
And for other issues.
Sonia Sotomayor wrote in that piece, which was joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Jackson, that under the new ruling, “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. Specifically, the court holds that the First Amendment exempts a website design company from a state law that prohibits the company from denying wedding websites to same-sex couples if the company chooses to sell those websites to the public.”
Her commentary, which occupied pages and pages of the decision, however, failed to note that the case did affirm the religious rights of web designer Lori Smith, and ordered that the state could not violate the First Amendment by requiring her to express a state-adopted ideology and message.
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The dissent also highlighted the double standard that exists for “rights” in America, with the “protected” classes, like the LGBT community, enjoying those that the general population does not.
That was confirmed by her advocacy for a requirement that those who do not believe the LGBT ideology still submit to it.
During the court’s earlier slapdown of Colorado’s activism, when the state’s “hostility” to Christianity was bashed by the high court in its decision for Masterpiece Cakeshop baker Jack Phillips, the issue arose.
The state condemned him to an indoctrination program because he declined to violate his Christian faith and create messaging with his cake artistry that would support a same-sex wedding. He’s still fighting the state because it is attempting a second round of punishment for him for refusing to promote the transgender beliefs.
But in that case, homosexual bakers across the Denver area were approached, and asked to create a cake with a quotation from the Bible condemning homosexuality. They all refused, and the state of Colorado granted them permission to do that because the message violated their own beliefs. The state, in that case, rejected the complaints of discrimination out of hand.
Sotomayor condemned the majority that ruled in support of the constitutional right to free speech, and that the government cannot order a person to hold the opinion the government chooses.
“That is wrong,” she said. “Profoundly wrong.” She claimed Colorado’s non-discrimination law, which controls what people can say, actually controls actions, not speech.
She complained of the speech that causes her trouble.
“Discrimination is not simply dollars and cents, hamburgers and movies; it is the humiliation, frustration, and embarrassment that a person must surely feel when he is told that he is unacceptable as a member of the public because of his [social identity].”
Her argument was that in order to be allowed to do business, owners must submit to the leftist ideologies that Democrat governors, in this case homosexual Gov. Jared Polis, and others impose.
Sotomayor said, “The First Amendment does not entitle petitions to a special exemption from a state law that simply requires them to serve all members of the public on equal terms,” leaving out that that state law actually infringes on the First Amendment rights of those providing services.
She admitted that the law provided a “burden” on Smith’s speech.
And she complained of the “stigmatic harm” that now falls on LGBT duos who would, apparently, demand services from a Christian business whose owner disapproves of their lifestyle choice.
The Daily Caller News Foundation described how Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, “blasted” his colleague Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent.
“In some places, the dissent gets so turned around about the facts that it opens fire on its own position,” Gorsuch explained “For instance: While stressing that a Colorado company cannot refuse ‘the full and equal enjoyment of [its] services based on a customer’s protected status,’ the dissent assures us that a company selling creative services ‘to the public’ does have a right ‘to decide what messages to include or not to include.’ But if that is true, what are we even debating? Instead of addressing the parties’ stipulations about the case actually before us, the dissent spends much of its time adrift on a sea of hypotheticals about photographers, stationers, and others, asking if they too provide expressive services covered by the First Amendment.”
The dissent spent pages on various civil rights events from history.
The report explained, “Gorsuch leveled Sotomayor’s claims that the majority’s opinion takes away immense strides made by the gay community, according to the text. He noted that there is much to applaud on that issue, but stressed that the dissent’s concerns do not answer ‘the question we face today: Can a state force someone who provides her own expressive services to abandon her conscience and speak its preferred message instead?'”
Gorsuch said, “When the dissent finally gets around to that question— more than halfway into its opinion—it reimagines the facts of this case from top to bottom. The dissent claims that Colorado wishes to regulate Ms. Smith’s ‘conduct,’ not her speech … The dissent chides us for deciding a pre-enforcement challenge … The dissent suggests (over and over again) that any burden on speech here is ‘incidental.’ All despite the Tenth Circuit’s finding that Colorado intends to force Ms. Smith to convey a message she does not believe with the ‘very purpose’ of ‘[e]liminating . . . ideas’ that differ from its own.”
He also pointed out Sotomayor was simply wrong when she claimed this was the “first time in history” that the right to refuse service to a “protected class” since Smith still is required by law to work with anyone “regardless of sexual orientation.”
“He further explained that the dissent would have required the ‘Court do something truly novel’ by allowing the government to force an individual to ‘speak contrary to her beliefs on a significant issue of personal conviction,'” the report explained.
The majority ruled that the state, under the guise of a “non-discrimination” law, cannot force a graphic designer to violate her Christian faith and promote same-sex marriages.
The case involved Lorie Smith and her 303 Creative, which does graphic designs and creates websites. She wants to do websites for traditional weddings, but the state had demanded that if she did any business of that type, the state would force her to promote same-sex weddings, too.
Not happening, the high court ruled.
“The First Amendment’s protections belong to all, not just to speakers whose motives the government finds worthy. In this case, Colorado seeks to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance,” the ruling said.
Critics of Colorado’s actions have pointed out that had its ideology been affirmed, a Muslim artist could have been forced, under penalty of law by the state, to create a work condemning Muhammad, or a Jewish writer forced to write promotions for the deification of Muhammad. An environmental activist in any business could have been forced to promote big oil, and more.
IMPORTANT NOTE: It’s hard to believe it’s really happening, but it is. Male athletes pretend to be females, dominate their sports, and are thereby rapidly destroying women’s competitive sports worldwide. Convicted male criminals suddenly claim to be transgender so they can be confined in a women’s prison and sexually abuse the female inmates there. Men claiming to be female likewise invade women’s locker rooms, bathrooms, schools, dormitories, sororities, shelters, spas and social organizations – and in the process steal women’s scholarships, advancement, honors and myriad other opportunities.
Meanwhile, transgender groomers and recruiters in schools and on social media platforms like TikTok are continually feeding and expanding the current “mass hysteria” craze that has already led countless teen girls to take testosterone and undergo double mastectomies in a pathetic effort to become boys. No wonder the CDC reports 3 in 5 teen girls say they feel “persistently sad or hopeless” and almost 1 in 3 say they have seriously considered committing suicide.
All of this on top of the radical left’s renewed obsession with killing women’s unborn babies via abortion.
The “woke” left’s maniacal attack on women and girls, virtually unreported by the rest of the media, is the entire focus of the sensational June issue of WND’s critically acclaimed WHISTLEBLOWER magazine, titled “THE LEFT’S TOTAL WAR ON WOMEN.” WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.
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