SCOTUS Creates License to Discriminate

Growing up Catholic I was long exposed to dogmatic, Pharisee-like right wing Catholics who insisted on (i) inflicting their beliefs - many based on 12th century levels of knowledge - on everyone else and (ii) condemning those who rejected their ignorance and prejudiced beliefs. Such Catholic extremists, aided by religiously extreme Justice Amy Coney Barrett, now control the U.S. Supreme Court and they are on a mission to divide and separate the nation into those they approve of and those they seek to punish and denigrate for failure to adhere to their white, right wing "Christian" agenda which seeks to move America back to a defacto Jim Crow era. In the last rulings of its just ended term these anti-modernity, anti-equality activists ended affirmative action - utterly ignoring the reality of ongoing racial discrimination - and granted evangelicals and Christofascists a license to discriminate disingenuously based on "freedom of speech."  In 303 Creative v. Elenis this reactionary majority of the Court effectively gutted many aspects of state non-discrimination and public accommodation laws.  The immediate target was the LGBT community, but the scope of the ruling has opened the door for discrimination against other minority groups.  In the minds of the majority anything that improves the lives of those they hate is a net loss for the white patriarchy world they seek to enforce on all.  A column in the Washington Post and a piece at CNN look at the license to discriminate that the Court has enshrined.  First, these highlights from CNN: 

The Supreme Court’s decision in favor of a Christian web designer in Colorado who refuses to create websites to celebrate same-sex weddings out of religious objections will have a far-reaching impact on other minority groups and could open the door to a slew of cases seeking to further chip away at civil rights protections in the US.

In a 6-3 opinion delivered Friday by Justice Neil Gorsuch that was joined by the court’s five other conservatives, the justices said that the First Amendment’s free speech protections permitted the web designer, Lorie Smith, to refuse to extend her services for same-sex weddings.

The ruling was rooted in free speech grounds and could create a massive hole in state public accommodation laws for businesses who sell so-called “expressive” goods, allowing for companies that provide customized, expressive products and services to pick and choose who they work with.

The idea of ‘customized’ or ‘expressive’ services are not categories,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a University of Texas Law professor and expert on public accommodations laws.  “So I think the category of businesses that will be able to claim free speech rights against anti-discrimination laws is not at all clear. But it’s not small,” Sepper added. “There’s going to be a relatively large range of businesses who can lay claim to free speech rights against anti-discrimination laws.”

The experts also warned that the decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis is just the opening chapter in what will likely be years of litigation from people looking to push the limits around state and local laws providing civil rights protections for various minority groups.

The vast majority of Americans live in an area where state or local public accommodation laws exist. As of this month, 22 states, the US Virgin Islands and Washington, DC, had laws on their books that explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that advocates for LGBTQ rights, while another five states interpret “existing prohibition(s) on sex discrimination to include sexual orientation and/or gender identity.”

The Supreme Court’s three liberal members dissented from Friday’s ruling, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing that the majority was giving businesses a “new license to discriminate.”

She suggested that the decision’s “logic cannot be limited to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity,” and wrote that it “threatens to balkanize the market and to allow the exclusion of other groups from many services.”

[L]egal experts believed that Sotomayor was not crying wolf in her dissent in that the opinion could open up other minority groups to be subjected to the same type of behavior for which Smith sought approval.

“The worry is that this provides a green light to any business owner that they can refuse service to any person on the basis of their identity, whether they’re gay or lesbian, or Jewish or Black, or anything, because they have an objection to those sorts of people being in their business,” said Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School.

“There was nothing in the opinion that limits it to objections to same sex marriage,” Franke added. . . . . this opens the door to race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin discrimination – any kind of discrimination,” she said.

Meanwhile, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement Friday that the decision promises to “destabilize the public marketplace” enabling all types of businesses to have “a first amendment right to refuse customers because of who they are.”

LGBTQ advocates and experts cautioned that, far from settling the issue at the center of the case, the ruling will likely embolden opponents of LGBTQ rights and spur a fresh wave of litigation that could strip away civil rights protections in other areas of life.

The column in the Post gets to the real motivation of the majority:  Giving special privileges to those they like and harming those they dislike.  Here are excerpts:

The U.S. Supreme Court has been very busy lately making clear which kinds of people it truly values. By striking down Roe v. Wade, the justices showed us how much they value the opinions of women who want a say in their own health care. By striking down affirmative action, they showed us how much they value White over Black and Brown students. By striking down student loan forgiveness, they demonstrated how much they value those who don’t have enough money to avoid the Ponzi scheme called student loans. And today they essentially legalized the unequal treatment of LGBTQ people by holding that discrimination is a small price to pay if it lifts up just one kind of love.

This Supreme Court has become a conservative dreamland: Out of touch with the country and determined to satisfy conservatives who think they win only when someone else loses.

This need by conservatives is not about faith, really. It’s about ensuring that Americans they don’t know and don’t like will suffer. They consider it a win for White people when Black and Brown people suffer. A win for men when women suffer. A win for older, richer people when younger, poorer people suffer. Everything in their minds is binary. We win. You lose. Black and white. And our current Supreme Court has become the favored weapon in their arsenal to bring about heartache for those they don’t like.

And it won’t end here. Because whatever lines the justices may think they have carefully drawn during this term, their benefactors in the deep conservative world are just getting warmed up. Get ready for more: More behavior on your part that they will essentially outlaw. More things we’re not allowed to teach. More roads for access unceremoniously cut off. More rights trampled on, and more barriers to discrimination lowered. Because the main priority of our conservative Supreme Court is to keep the status quo secure. Solid. And that means keeping certain people down.

These "conservatives" are not nice and decent people and the sooner the rest of the population wakes up to this reality demands an enlargement of the Court, the better.