The SCOTUS ruled for the bigots! The religiously driven seriously old haters of the newer culture ruled it is OK to discriminate against the gays, if you have a sincerely held belief. I am hurting so bad seeing the US revert to a religiously driven theocracy that denies any progress in society since the 1950s. We fought these battles, we in the US are now going so far backward from the rest of the world. Hell even Nepal just approved same-sex marriage. The fundamentalist won’t stop even as they age out and become more of a minority until they rule us all with their hateful church doctrines based on words of people who did not even understand germ theory written 2,500 years ago. I am so upset at a country that claims all people are created equal that says because I am gay I have less or no rights if someone has a belief against my existence. On a prior case one of the Justices wrote that discrimination against religion is the worst kind of discrimination. Well you can choose your religion, you can change it or stop believing in any of them. I was born gay. I don’t have a choice in that. I am gay. But someone who can choose what myths they believe in that day can deny me services or rights due to that belief. Sad hugs.
The Guardian reports:
The suit centers on Lorie Smith, a website designer who does not want to provide her services for gay weddings because of her religious objections. In 2016, she says, a gay man named Stewart requested her services for help with his upcoming wedding. “We are getting married early next year and would love some design work done for our invites, place, names etc. We might also stretch to a website,” reads a message he apparently sent her through a message on her website.
In court filings, her lawyers produced a copy of the inquiry. But Stewart, who requested his last name be withheld for privacy, said in an interview with the Guardian that he never sent the message, even though it correctly lists his email address and telephone number. He has also been happily married to a woman for the last 15 years, he said. In fact, until he received a call this week from a reporter from the magazine, Stewart says had no idea he was somehow tied up in a case that had made it to the Supreme Court.
The New Republic reports:
“I’m not really sure where that came from,” he told me of the mysterious 2016 inquiry that used his name, email address, and cell phone number to request a wedding website for a same-sex marriage nearly a decade after he married a woman. He is a designer himself, something of a known quantity in design circles—he’s spoken at conferences and on podcasts, and has a “decent Twitter following,” he said.
The design world is small. But not small enough, he said, that he had heard of Lorie Smith—not until her case was already before the Supreme Court, and the design community began discussing its potential fallout. It didn’t make sense to him. Why would a web designer—as the website the inquiry referenced as his own made clear that he was—living in San Francisco, seek to hire someone in another state who has never built a wedding website, let alone a website for a same-sex wedding, to build his wedding website?
Photo: Alliance Defending Freedom president Michael Farris.
Hit the New Republic link for a very in-depth accounting of this story. As I’ve said many times, the ADF invents these businesses with sole intention of challenging local LGBTQ rights ordinances. The ruling in the case is expected tomorrow morning.
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