European here so it may not be clear to me, but I thought discriminating against religious movements like the church or trump supporters is still illegal. Correct?
Political affiliation is not protected, religious affiliation is. It’s true that the Right has been doing their level best to politicise their religious feelings into public life, so that barring Trump supporters effectively excludes Evangelicals and a majority of Catholics. This may not be their desired outcome, but perhaps they shouldn’t have tied their religious sentiment to political causes.
These signs are surely in response to the recent US Supreme Court ruling which allowed a website designer to refuse to make websites for same-sex weddings.
First, churches are religious; Trump supporters are political, and not religious. In the US, religion is a "protected class", but political alignment is not. But traditionally, political alignment or part affiliation is not discriminated against, even if it is federall legal to do so. (Various states may have their own clauses making political alignment a protected class in certain contexts, I'm not sure.) Also important to this discussion is that sexual preference is not a protected class federally, although I know that many states have enshrined protection for sexual preference in their own state laws.
If a case were brought about discrimination against Trump supporters because of these signs, in a jurisdiction where politics was not a protected class, I should expect that that case would fail, under current law. But just like SCOTUS is highly political right now, lower courts are, too, especially lower federal courts. It's anybody's guess as to whether a given judge would actually adhere to existing case law.
For the religious side of these signs, it gets interesting. As above, SCOTUS has ruled that a religious business owner can discriminate against customers based on the business owner's "religious disagreement" with a position held by the customer, presumably where that disagreement does not overlap with a protected class.
And there's the rub. Religion is a protected class, so it should be prohibited to discriminate against someone for their religious position. This, however, really tips the scales in favor of the religious: the religious business owner can discriminate on the basis of their own religious belief, but no one can discriminate against them because of that same religious belief. To me, this seems to tread very heavily on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ...
"Congress," in this context, has been interpreted by the courts to mean more generally "the government," at any level. The recent SCOTUS ruling gives a religious business owner the right to discriminate on the basis of their religion, but the right of other people to discriminate against that business owner on the exact same basis remains prohibited. Again, I am not a lawyer, but that seems to be clearly in opposition to the Establishment Clause.
All of this is interesting, but none of it is cause for concern.
What is cause for concern is the foundation of Obergefell, which made same sex marriage legal in all of the US. That basis is that the only difference between opposite sex and same sex marriages is the sex of one of the people in the couple. An argument I recall from the time was that prohibiting same sex marriage is unconstitutional, because to do so would be discriminating against someone on the basis of sex - which is a protected class. However, that does not appear to have been mentioned in the court's ruling.
No matter the reason, if it is unconstitutional to discriminate against same sex couples in the context of their getting married in the first place, it should stand to reason that it would be unconstitutional to discriminate against those same sex couples in any other context. Reason does not appear to be this court's strong suit; they have decided that the rights of religious people to discriminate on the basis of their personal and individual beliefs "trumps" (pun intended) the rights of people (religious or not) to not be discriminated against.
This is a "canary in a coal mine" to overturn all manner of previous courts' rulings: Obergefell (same sex marriage), Loving v Virginia (interracial marriage), Griswold (access to contraception), Lawrence v Texas (legalization of homosexuality), and certainly others.
Again, all of this seems to prioritize religion, which is in clear opposition of the Establishment Clause.
Political affiliation is not a protected class. You are permitted to discriminate based on politics. Religious affiliation is a protected class. You cannot discriminate solely on the basis of religion... Until now.
Conservatives love to discriminate, but their new rulings are also making it easier to discriminate against them.
It's complicated and the implications and scope are not entirely clear.
The court stated that creative works such as web design qualify as a form of speech, and that the first amendment does not allow the government to use law to force creators to speak any message — especially one with which they disagree. Essentially, any business with something that might be considered speech as its product or service may be free to discriminate against protected classes. We aren't sure how far this will extend in practice, but I expect many will test it.
In this case of this post, it depends on what is being sold.
Edit: wrote this before my coffee and thus neglected to point out what replies said: political affiliation is not a protected class in America and these signs are a bit misleading. See replies.
I think this is ok. It’s how the market works. If you have enough people who agree with your stance, then you’ll survive, if not, you fail. Transversely, if you are trying to make a profitable business, you remove all roadblocks from a consumer who wants to do business with you.
That’s a very shallow way to look at it. First wrong: This isn’t a numbers game. A party with more people won’t necessarily win. Second wrong: Not all people who are not the minority are against the minority
No, given the preponderance of white owned businesses, the way that turns out is Jim crow. You think that some store in rural bumfuck will hurt with a sign saying "no blacks, jews or gays"?
I don’t have an issue with any of this. Private Business owners can sell their products or services to whoever they want. Don’t see what the big deal is. If you don’t like it, there’s plenty more competition willing to take your money.
They allowed a company to discriminate against a gay customer for religious reasons, when they requested to make a website them. It's important to note that the supposed customer never actually contacted the company, is not gay and had been married to a woman for about 20 years. So this was all based on a lie
They basically said a business can discriminate. The case in question was by a bakery that didn’t want to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. SCOTUS said that was ok.
The kicker is that the claims put forth in the lawsuit by the bakery may be based on lies. The man they claimed wanted the cake isn’t gay, is already married, never ordered from the bakery, and didn’t even know he was mentioned in the court case until a reporter contacted him for comment.
This case is a web designer for wedding websites, not a bakery. The bakery thing was several years ago now.
Both rulings cute the same fundamental precedent: “expressive works”/“expressive goods” — that is, services that entail some act of creative work and/or speech, generally in endorsement.
For example, to take a less-favorable position as an example, a web designer could under this ruling post as terms of their services that they do not design websites for anyone connected with a Baptist church, because designing websites for them would require the designer to write speech and create designs participating in what the designer considered bigoted. If a Baptist group sued on these grounds, and the government said “no, you must take them on as clients”, the government would be coercing a particular kind of speech from this web designer — that is, the government would be forcing the web designer to, by court order, write that speech they see as clearly bigoted.
A grocery store could not, however, say “we won’t sell groceries to anyone from a Baptist church”, because selling someone a gallon of milk or whatever else off the store shelves does not involve participating in any of their speech. If a grocery store did so, and a Baptist group sued, and the government said “no, you must sell them groceries”, the government is not coercing any sort of speech from the grocery store owner.
That’s the crux of the issue here: not Jim-Crow “we don’t sell groceries to coloreds” baseline discrimination against people, but instead trying to walk the line of not using lawsuits as a weapon to coerce someone to participate in some viewpoint.
A six-justice majority agreed that Colorado cannot enforce a state anti-discrimination law against a Christian website designer who does not want to create wedding websites for same-sex couples because doing so would violate her First Amendment right to free speech.
I feel like this whole thing is simply just a clarification on what was already the case. Like, a baker can’t just refuse a gay person for being gay. But they could refuse to make that gay person a huge dick shaped cake because, presumably, they would also refuse to make a huge dick shaped cake for a straight woman as well. The reason the customer wants the dick cake is irrelevant; merely that the cake is a dick.
It’s close to that but not quite - a dick cake is a dick cake, but a wedding cake with a man and woman couple vs. a wedding cake with a man and man couple is treated differently
So, this is treating representing gay marriage as if it is unethical and vulgar which is clearly discriminatory
The law still doesn’t permit the shop owner to blanket refuse service to someone who is gay (or MAGA), but fully allows them to descriminate against gay people exercising the same freedoms non-gays have, like getting married
BudLight was pandering and got called on it by everyone that was paying attention. “Go woke, go broke” is clearly not a trend, just look at Twitter and Elon doing the opposite and losing fuckloads of money.
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