Supreme Court to hear religious liberty dispute between a Christian business and the LGBT agenda
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a dispute between a Christian business and the radical LGBT agenda, and while some may see this as good news, it’s most likely bad news based on the high court’s repeated refusal to defend religious liberty against the onslaught of LGBT-radicalism being foisted on America under the rainbow banner.
The dispute involves a Colorado wedding website designer’s refusal to offer her services to weddings involving same-sex couples. And even though the designer’s stance on marriage is based on her religious beliefs, the Supreme Court will be limiting the case to the free-speech implications of a Colorado law, not religious liberty. (via Denver Post):
The high court said Tuesday it would hear the case of Colorado-based web designer Lorie Smith. Smith offers graphic and website design services and wants to expand to wedding website services, but she says her religious beliefs would lead her to decline any request from a same-sex couple to design a wedding website.
She also wants to post a statement on her website about her beliefs, but that would run afoul of a Colorado anti-discrimination law. Smith had argued the law violates her free speech and religious rights.
The Supreme Court said in taking the case, however, that it would look only at the free speech issue. It said it would decide whether a law that requires an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment. The case is expected to be argued in the fall.
The Colorado law in question is the same one involved the 2018 case decided by the Supreme Court of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, a Christian baker who refused to bake a custom wedding cake for a homosexual couple based on the grounds that doing so would violate his religious liberty.
This is the case that leads me to conclude that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear this latest case between a Christian business and the LGBT agenda is bad news.
When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jack Phillips in a 7-2 decision nearly four years ago, it was considered a “narrow” victory because the root issue concerning his case — freedom of religion — was left unanswered. The ruling wasn’t so much pro-First Amendment as it was anti-Colorado Civil Right Commission. Even the ACLU agreed with the ruling.
I and many other conservatives warned at the time that SCOTUS’s failure to protect religious liberty meant that government would still be free to pass laws forcing Christians to violate their consciences in the marketplace. These warnings proved to be accurate when the Colorado Civil Rights Commission launched another assault against religious liberty after Jack Phillips refused to bake a “gender transition” cake based on the same religious grounds as before.
Phillips lost the first round of this latest fight last year, but he has filed an appeal.
The recent Supreme Court case involving the Colorado wedding website designer arose when artist Lorie Smith included a disclaimer on her website explaining she would only design sites for heterosexual weddings which is when she ran headlong into the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act.
The Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act restricts the ability of a “public accommodation” to turn away customers based on their identity, including sexual orientation, or even communicate an intent to offer unequal treatment on this basis. The law defines a public accommodation as a business that serves the public and is not principally used for religious purposes.
Before Smith posted her disclaimer, she filed a preemptive lawsuit challenging the law over concerns that her message would otherwise run afoul of the nondiscrimination law.
The Supreme Court could rule in Smith’s favor based as a free speech issue, and that would be good news. But the bad news is that this will allow the high court to punt on the religious liberty issue.
In the Obergefell v. Hodges same-sex marriage wedding case, Anthony Kennedy — the Justice who created a non-existent constitutional right to same-sex marriage — wrote for the majority and noted how the case created a “difficult situation” when it comes to how the LGBT agenda impacts religious liberty and how the issue “must await further elaboration” in the courts.
In other words, high court religious liberty “victories” over the LGBT agenda are bad news for Christian business owners because they are rarely as they appear.
While Kennedy no longer sits on the bench, his successor, Brett Kavanaugh, is no sure thing when it comes to protecting liberty. Despite Mitch McConnell’s claims to the contrary, Trump and the Republican Senate didn’t save the courts, and Kavanaugh has proven himself to be a solid ally of the leftist wing of the court and an unreliable defender of the Constitution.
One year ago, the Supreme Court, led by Neil Gorsuch, in a 6-3 decision (Bostock v. Clayton County), ruled that an inalienable right to transgenderism existed in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act with no protections for religious liberty.
Following the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop nearly four years ago, my conservative friends and I warned that despite the Christian baker’s so-called victory, religious liberty was still in danger. Unfortunately, these warnings were rejected by the army of cheap grace evangelicals and Trumpists willingly goose-stepping their way down the road of compromise that leads to the abyss of tyranny.
I hate that we were right, but the fact that we were needs to serve as a wakeup call for Christian constitutional conservatives. If America continues on her current course of lukewarm spirituality and political indifference, we will find ourselves living in a country resembling the days of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Nazi Germany.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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