The oral argument the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is hearing today is for
303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. That is the case in which a website designer is claiming that the Colorado Civil Rights Division is violating her 1st amendment rights by requiring her to create websites for same-sex marriages if she wants to create marriage websites. This case mirrors the Jack Phillips Masterpiece Cakeshop case from a few years ago (also out of Colorado) which SCOTUS decided in Jack Phillips’s favor, but only narrowly, deciding that Colorado was discriminating against him specifically, but SCOTUS punted on whether or not the actual law in Colorado is constitutional. It looks like, with SCOTUS taking this case, they are ready to actually rule on whether or not these compelled speech laws are constitutional, with most legal scholars predicting that SCOTUS will strike them down.
I’ll be listening to this oral argument sometime this week.
This was the price to get Anthony Kennedy and perhaps the weasel shite John Roberts to sign on. Will be interesting to see how this comes out. Brett Kavanaugh was appointed by President Trump as a price for Kennedy to resign.
I wonder if the rinos in the Senate would go along with a national bill to codify the Colorado law?
The details of the decision are all important. I will not be surprised if Roberts votes with the pro-web designer majority so he gets to name the writer of the decision.
The article shows the maneuvering that’s already taken place
When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in February, the justices sidestepped whether the law violated Smith’s free exercise of religion. Instead, the court said it would look at the dispute through the lens of free speech and decide whether applying the public accommodations law “to compel an artist to speak or stay silent” violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment.
A mostly well done article by Virginia Business that brings up both sides of refusing service and mentions this case. There are a couple points I don’t think are great, but this is experienced newspaper editor level reporting done by an outlet that rarely covers this sort of stuff, so I have to commend the author for actually doing the work on this and not making it too politically biased.
1st click to that domain is free, after that you hit a paywall, so don’t close the window if you need to go back to it.
I don’t get it – what’s the difference between this and Masterpiece Cakeshop? Are you saying that the SCOTUS decision only applied to Jack Philips and nobody else?
The original SCOTUS decision in masterpiece cakeshop told the colorado civil rights commission that they erred in their ruling against jack phillips because they violated the free exercise clause in his case. It did not address the constitutionality of the Colorado law that the commission was attempting to enforce (on the free exercise OR free speech sense). It punted that question. Today it has been taken back up. But as @onenote pointed out, there is a decent chance that they will still punt the question of free exercise after today’s case. They will almost surely rule on the question of if it is unconstitutional based on the free speech clause.
