When is harm done in the Courts?
Some confounding SCOTUS decisions which do not have logical backing and are more partisan than normal. There is no standing on either of these cases.
This SCOTUS ruling is puzzling to me in that it brings up the question in my mind of when is harm done? “303” was not asked to make a cake. It did not refuse to make a cake. It assumed the law would be enforced upon them, if they refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple. We are talking about a hypothetical occurrence. The courts should have rejected the premise from the beginning as they suffered no harm.
Some points:
In 2008, Colorado amended the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) to expand its anti-discrimination protections to members of the LGBTQ community. In 2016, 303 Creative, a company that wants to offer wedding web design services, along with its owner, filed a pre-enforcement challenge to the law in federal court. They object to same-sex marriage and argue that CADA compels their speech in violation of the First Amendment by requiring the company to offer the same services to same-sex couples that it offers to different-sex couples.
The district court concluded that applying CADA to 303 Creative is constitutional. The Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed such also Then 303 Creative asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, and it agreed to do so.
Who is Elenis?
Unlike similar cases predating this one, there wasn’t a same-sex couple suing the business for discrimination. Elenis in the case is Aubrey Elenis, director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division, who was sued in her professional capacity and listed first.
Elenis had yet to refuse to make a cake for a same-sex couple. The circumstance has yet to be presented to Elenis. It is a hypothetical or a what-if?. There was no issue. And the courts took it up even when no harm was done to Elenis.
“There was no complaint. This wasn’t even somebody who had opened up a business. This was somebody who said, ‘Hey, I’m thinking I might open a business AND I’m thinking that I might want to discriminate against same-sex marriage couples.”
Hypotheticals, which should have been laughed out of SCOTUS. Each year, there are pages of cases which SCOTUS does not take up and rejected at the end of each term. SCOTUS does take up eighty cases per year and settles ~100 cases yearly. And they took up Elenis?
Justice Gorsuch also took issue with Justice Sotomayor’s dissent claiming it is a distortion of the case at hand. Gorsuch argues Sotomayor’s dissent “spends much of its time adrift on a sea of hypotheticals about photographers, stationers, and others, asking if they too provide expressive services covered by the First Amendment.” Speaking of which, Gorsuch presents the reasoning in his response as to why the case should never had been accepted at any court level. The Elenis case is all assumptions and hypotheticals.
Some reading:
Andrew Weissmann Baffled by Supreme Court’s Reasoning in Gay Rights Case, mediaite.com, Michael Luciano
Gorsuch rebukes Sotomayor for saying his ruling gives LGBT people ‘second-class status,’ The Gazette, Kaelan Deese
Then there is the issue of standing. Three times in the past, SCOTUS rejected cases coming from states in which there was no harm done to them. The most recent case of Student Loan Relief, SCOTUS ruled in favor of Nebraska based upon made up logic by Roberts and his Major Questions Doctrine. No harm came to any animals or Nebraska, Missouri, Texas, or any other state objecting to student loan relief.
“I refer to the doctrine as unfounded because the appeals to precedents, constitutional principles, and political theories that the Court or individual Justices have offered to defend the doctrine are not very
persuasive; unbounded because of the enormous uncertainty that the Court has created regarding
the reach of the doctrine; and confounded because of the perplexity the Court’s shifting
explanations have created.”
More Reading:
The Major Questions Doctrine: Unfounded, Unbounded, and Confounded; George Mason University, Ronald M. Levin
Run, further analysis will not yield any reasonable explanation for these decisions. The court is political and making political decisions under the claimed rubric of law.
Jack:
Your answer states the conclusion to which I agree. What I am attempting to do is display their reasoning or basis. I look at this and with my limited knowledge and background, I understand what they are doing. Do others, though? I try to state the obvious conclusion this is not about law. It is as you say, we have a political court.
The court has always been political to one degree or another. This one is extreme.
What the Court majority has been doing is clarifying religious rights, such as the right to an employee sabbath when there is no undue cost to an employer. This decision is along the same lines. Religious rights being clarified.
@ltr,
I fail to see how this decision clarifies, unless the clarity is the gradual erosion of public accommodations law. If my “religion” requires me to deny a seat at my soda fountain to Blacks because of the curse of Ham, how if that different from refusing to create a web site for a gay couple because the OT curses homosexuality? We’ve seen this before.
God is created in man’s image. The the SCOTUS majority is rewriting the law in their image.
joel
again, i agree with you up to a point. what i agree with is the general sense that the Court is dishonestly acting on behalf of a political faction.in this case what amounts to “the ruling faction.”
but the current ruling is different from the “seat at the soda fountain” in that the case is made up out of whole cloth. there is no widespread disadvantaging of gay people to the point of destroying their very souls, or creating an underclass of exploitable people. Southern style segregation was a national as well as a humanitarian “problem” [uderstatement because I can’t think of the right word for it]. Gays face discrimination in this country, but systematic should-crippling discrimination and exploitation.
the current case appears to be designed to increase discrimination, not decrease it, and in my view is motivated by a pure evil joy in causing harm and pain to people.
on the other hand the claim of “religious freedom” is so bogus it would be laughed out of court if it, again, was not supported by that same pure evil motivation to cause harm and pain and divide the people against each other for the benefit of that ruling faction.
The SCOTUS majority is indeed rewriting the law in their own image, but God has nothing to do with it. Your introducing “religion” as the cause of all this is just evidence of how much the creators of hate thy neighbor have succeeded in poisoning our minds.
bad typos in the above. please use your imagination to guess what i meant.
soul-crippling
actually not soul-crippling
ltr
you are hopelessly naive. this decision was set up from the beginning to reach a foregone conclusion so at odds with reality they had to create a fake plaintiff and a fake defendant.
nobody asked, but my take is that there is no religion that requires a caterer to not bake wedding cakes fo gay people. this is a fake “religious principle” created by fake “christians” who hope their followers can’t read what it was that jesus taught.
on the other hand, i can’t believe that gay people anywhere outside of texas can’t find a gay caterer or at least a sane one willing to take their money.
what worries me here is that the govvernment, and by necessity the rest of us have fallen into worryig about fake issues created for no other reason than to keep us at each other’s throats while they pick our pockets until they can enslave us frankly and we won’t have to worry about our moey or our religion or even remember the last best hope of mankind.