Excerpt from Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in 303 Creative LLC, et al., where the Republican Supreme Court supermajority ruled that discrimination against LGTBQ people is allowed in a public business:
... Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants 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.” [snip]
And not just at the Court. Around the country, there has been a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities. New forms of inclusion have been met with reactionary exclusion. This is heartbreaking. Sadly, it is also familiar. 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. As T will explain, the law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment. Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group. I dissent...
Expect the bigots in our midst to continue to chip away at the rights and freedoms Americans have enjoyed for decades, and for those bigots to be supported and enabled by the 6 lying, Republican pols- in- robes on the corrupt Supreme Court.
There are no precedents, there are no super- precedents. In the future, that should also apply to Supreme Court justice tenure and number of justices. The dam has been breached.
