Connecticut Reaction.

Being a Blue state with a similar law as Colorado’s non-discrimination law Connecticut had its law nullified by the Supreme Court’s decision.

Connecticut Officials Decry Supreme Court Ruling in Colorado LGBTQ Rights Case

CT News Junkie

By Hugh McQuaid

June 30, 2023

State officials denounced on Friday a U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing a graphic designer to refuse business from LGBTQ couples. The decision against a Colorado anti-discrimination law could have consequences for a similar statute in Connecticut.

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“Today’s decision by the Supreme Court of the United States continues the systemic discrimination that LGBTQ+ people in Connecticut and beyond have been routinely subjected to throughout human existence, which is exclusion from an equal and safe opportunity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” said Reps. Jeff Currey, D-East Hartford, Raghib Allie-Brennan, D-Bethel, Dominique Johnson, D-Norwalk, and Marcus Brown, D-Bridgeport.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong was among a group of attorneys general to submit an amicus brief in defense of the Colorado law. On Friday, Tong called the decision “wrong and hurtful” and accused the high court of striking down fundamental protections for American citizens.

The governor said…

“I think it’s very disappointing,” Lamont said of the ruling. “How many private businesses will they allow to deny service because they don’t like your sexual orientation, race, color, creed? I think that’s contrary to the America that I know.”

This is really going to bite the Supreme Court in the ass. They are so focused in the animosity against all things LGBTQ+ that they lost the big picture.

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the minority’s opinion…

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. The Court also holds that the company has a right to post a notice that says, “‘no [wedding websites] will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages.’”

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...When the civil rights and women’s rights movements sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims. Now the Court faces a similar test. A business open to the public seeks to deny gay and lesbian customers the full and equal enjoyment of its services based on the owner’s religious belief that same-sex marriages are “false.” The business argues, and a majority of the Court agrees, that because the business offers services that are customized and expressive, the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment shields the business from a generally applicable law that prohibits discrimination in the sale of publicly available goods and services. That is wrong. Profoundly wrong...  Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group. I dissent. 

A “public accommodations law” is a law that guarantees to every person the full and equal enjoyment of places of public accommodation without unjust discrimination. …  All but five States have analogous laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of these and other traits, such as age, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. And numerous local laws offer similar protections.

The Accommodation Clause does not apply to any “church, synagogue, mosque, or other place that is principally used for religious purposes.”

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Not only have public accommodations laws expanded to recognize more forms of unjust discrimination, such as discrimination based on race, sex, and disability, such laws have also expanded to include more goods and services as “public accommodations.”

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Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, no less than anyone else, deserve that dignity and freedom. The movement for LGBT rights, and the resulting expansion of state and local laws to secure gender and sexual minorities’ full and equal enjoyment of publicly available goods and services, is the latest chapter of this great American story.

She goes on to provide examples of what she discussed and also that this very same question was before the court before and found that it didn’t violate the First Amendment ... in which the owner of a chain of drive-in establishments asserted that requiring him to “contribut[e]” to racial integration in any way violated the First Amendment by interfering with his religious liberty

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Last but not least is Runyon v. McCrary, 427 U. S. 160 (1976), a case the majority studiously avoids. In Runyon, the Court confronted the question whether “commercially operated” schools had a First Amendment right to exclude Black children, notwithstanding a federal law against racial discrimination in contracting … The Court, however, reasoned that the schools’ “practice” of denying educational services to racial minorities was not shielded by the First Amendment, for two reasons: First, “the Constitution places no value on discrimination.” 427 U. S., at 176 (alterations and internal quotations marks omitted). Second, the government’s regulation of conduct did not “inhibit” the schools’ ability to teach its preferred “ideas or dogma.” 

This was a designer case, the plaintiff’s attorneys created their case base on previous rulings by the Supreme Court and created a “What if” scenario.

Again, Smith’s company has never sold a wedding website to any customer. Colorado, therefore, has never had to enforce its antidiscrimination laws against the company. As the majority puts it, however, Smith “worries that, if she enters the wedding website business, the State will force her to convey messages inconsistent with her belief that marriage should be reserved to unions between one man and one woman.”

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The breadth of petitioners’ pre-enforcement challenge is astounding. According to Smith, the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment entitles her company to refuse to sell any “websites for same-sex weddings,” even though the company plans to offer wedding websites to the general public. Ibid.; see also Brief for Petitioners 22–23, and n. 2; Tr. of Oral Arg. 37–38. In other words, the company claims a categorical exemption from a public accommodations law simply because the company sells expressive services. The sweeping nature of this claim should have led this Court to reject it. 

B

The First Amendment does not entitle petitioners to a special exemption from a state law that simply requires them to serve all members of the public on equal terms.

Since the state never issued and injunction there was no injury in the legal sense and she wanted a blanket “Get out of Jail Free” card.

Recall that Smith wants to post a notice on her company’s homepage that the company will refuse to sell any website for a samesex couple’s wedding. This Court, however, has already said that “a ban on race-based hiring may require employers to remove ‘White Applicants Only’ signs.”

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The Court reaches the wrong answer in this case because it asks the wrong questions. The question is not whether the company’s products include “elements of speech.” … Because Colorado seeks to apply CADA only to the refusal to provide same-sex couples the full and equal enjoyment of the company’s publicly available services, so that the company’s speech “is only ‘compelled’ if, and to the extent,” the company chooses to offer “such speech” to the public, any burden on speech is “plainly incidental” to a content-neutral regulation of conduct.

In other words, she could post the refusing to do “websites for same-sex weddings” wouldn’t be a violation of Colorado law only if she refused to do the website. Once again there needs to be an injured party to the case. Either the person or persons she refused to do the website for or when the state acted upon the discrimination.

This whole case was a set-up to spoon feed the Supreme Court.

So what is going to bite them? The same argument can be used to refuse services to Blacks or Jews or Muslims, or unmarried mothers, or on and on whatever form of discrimination you want just by speaking the magic words… “It is against my religious beliefs”.

To me this seems like a manipulation of our legal system.

Set up, like a bowlin' pin

Knocked down, it gets to wearin' thin

They just won't let you be, oh no

“Truckin” by Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Robert Hunter