Slip-Sliding Away With SCOTUS

It's not just same sex marriage.

Lorie Smith is a professed “Evangelical Christian” who has a web design business in Colorado. Her state has strict laws against business discrimination based on the usual minority categories including gender and sexual orientation. Ms. Smith has been thinking she’d like to expand her business into developing wedding websites, but she knows the law as currently applied would require her to serve all comers, including same sex couples. Due to her “faith” she believes marriage is between one man and one woman and thus would not be willing to take on same sex clients.

Mind you, no one has asked her to, of yet. She has filed a request for a pre-emptive ruling in order that she can feel free to expand the scope of her business without fear of being sued. She was recruited by a conservative Christian organization looking for a test case, and now here they all are, having just faced the bench at the nation’s highest court.

Smith’s legal team structured their case in terms of compelled speech. Being required to do “creative work” in support of a practice she does not believe in is a violation of her First Amendment rights, they claim. But obviously when a public business refuses service to a client based on race, religion, gender or sexual orientation that is discrimination. That is a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. So how do we resolve the conflict? That’s supposed to be the role of the Supreme Court.  

Of course, this case doesn’t have to be, and isn’t really limited to same sex marriage. The case uses same sex marriage as a flash point to take a dive on the slippery slope of clawing back rights and freedoms that were hard won in the past seventy-five years.  And in considering that, I have some questions for Ms. Smith and her legal team.

Supreme Court justices like to argue hypotheticals. They like to get into the weeds of slippery slopes and unintended consequences—I mean normally they do. But I didn’t hear much of that from reports of yesterday’s arguments. So here are my questions.

First, we know that Evangelical Christians profess to oppose pre-marital sex or extramarital sex. Does that mean, Ms. Smith, that you would also refuse to create a wedding website for a hetero couple who did not save themselves for marriage? What about divorced people getting remarried. Doesn’t your theology affirm that when a man and woman are married, they become one flesh and cannot be separated in the eyes of God? Would you also refuse to marry the twice married? And if your answer is no, you would take on that business, then you have exposed the hypocrisy and falsehood of your position. It isn’t about being faithful to your beliefs, it’s about targeted discrimination.

Ms. Smith is in court with her sponsors to do something much bigger than protect her right to create content she can believe in. She is a cog in a Christian nationalist campaign to allow a preferred religious group to dominate those with different beliefs or no beliefs. You’ve heard me say it before. It isn’t your religious liberty they fight for. It isn’t the First Amendment. It is a complete restructuring of Constitutional law designed to dismantle Constitutional rights in America and to ensconce Christian, authoritarian, oligarchic leaders in power.

But it doesn’t stop there, because the ultimate aim of this grand design is to take us back to pre-civil rights days. It starts with the slippery slope of Christian oppression of non-Christians and Christians who don’t fit the standard definition and continues until there is a full return to the Wild South of refusing to serve anyone whose looks you don’t like, whose beliefs you oppose, whose lifestyle you find offensive, or whose race, gender, or sexual orientation you wish to oppress. Once any kind of discrimination is allowed back into precedent, the whole Jenga tower comes crashing down.

It's about religious and economic elites taking power and abusing power whenever they can. It’s about the death of a nation.