Supreme Court anti-LGBTQ ruling is 'a made-up case': Colorado attorney general

02 July 2023

The United States Supreme Court ruled Friday that an evangelical Christian graphic designer may "discriminate against same-sex couples" over "what the court claims is her First Amendment right to free speech."

Appearing on MSNBC's Symone Sunday, Colorado Attorney General Phillip Weiser spoke with Symone Sanders-Townsend, criticizing the high court for the decision, calling it "made-up."

Sanders-Townsend began the segment by noting SCOTUS Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch's opinion, in which he said, "Under Colorado's logic, the government may compel anyone who speaks for pay on a particular topic to accept all commissions on that same topic — no matter the underlying message — if the topic somehow implicates a customer's statutorily protected trait."

She asked Weiser, " First of all, what is he saying? And what is your response to that, Mr. Attorney General."

The AG replied, What he is trying to say is that here is someone that had a free speech interest that was being implicated in a negative way,” Weiser said. "But the problem, first off…this is a made-up case. This was based on hypotheticals, and the court didn't have to deal with the whole equation. In a real case, you have a victim who is denied services, and the consequences of the court's ruling would be much more self-evident. But second, let's be clear, here; whoever creates a website, or whoever creates any artistic work can make whatever they want. Our position, they have to sell it to everyone, and they cannot restrict the sales in a public business because they don't like someone’s ethnicity, religion, race, what have you."

Sanders-Townsend then asked, "Mr. Attorney General, you know, the court they limited the scope of this decision to, what they're calling inherently expressive services. And they classify those services as speech. I just don't think it ends here, though. Do you? And is this a direct challenge to Title 2 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964?"

Weiser asserted, "This is both a societal challenge and it's a legal challenge. It's a societal challenge because we as a society now have a choice if we have an expressive business," emphasizing, "We can serve everyone and stand for our nation's motto of E pluribus unum, or now, as you said, people have a license to discriminate, saying, 'I have this expressive product and I'm not going to offer it to everybody. In terms of what this means as a legal matter, there's now a new defense that's never existed before where people can say I don't wanna offer my product to some group because I don't believe in them. It could be religious, it could be gender. Someone could say 'I'm a photographer — I don't believe women should work outside the home, I'm not taking professional pictures of women.' The mischief and damage of this ruling is yet to come and all of us who are charged with administering anti-discrimination laws need to do our best to limit it."

Watch Mediaite's video below or at this link.

From Your Site Articles