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Friday, June 30, 2023

The Supreme Court legalizes discrimination


    The Supreme Court in its ruling in the case brought by web designer Lorie Smith ruled that she would not have to design a wedding website for a gay couple because it was against her religious views.  She had never been asked to design a website for a gay couple so she had no "legal standing" to bring a lawsuit but that didn't matter to this Court.   Past Supreme Courts have a history of making new precedence to expand rights but this Court makes new precedence to take rights away. At risk are the rights of all types of groups of people who might now be discriminated against because someone may have discriminatory religious beliefs.  I wonder how Justice Thomas, in a mixed racial marriage, would feel if someone said their beliefs from the Bible spoke against race mixing in marriage and refused to serve them in a restaurant?  
      The Founding Fathers gave us a Country with a separation of church and state and the freedom to practice freely any religion.  The problems develop when your faith tells you to discriminate or treat non-believers in a discriminatory manner. To have our 21st Century's behavior governed by a 2000 or 4000-year-old belief system is where some people are today.  The Bible told slaves to obey their masters and husbands to stone their wives for adultery.   It is bad enough that conservatives want to take us back to the 1950s or the 1860s but to allow the 4000-year-old Bible to determine the level of discrimination today is where we may be finding ourselves with this Supreme Court. The Court today seems to be making rulings using the Bible more than the Constitution.

P.S.
      For all those voters who sat out the 2016 election in states with close margins and gave us a Trump presidency that gave us our present Supreme Court, I hope you show up in 2024.

P.S. 1
     Justice Sotomayor took issue with her conservative colleagues' decision, writing dissentingly: "When the civil rights and women’s rights movements sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed constitutional rights to discriminate based on sincere religious beliefs. The brave past Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims."

P.S.2
    If you think that because we live in a liberal state we are protected from the conservative beliefs of other states you are wrong.  The Supreme Court struck down a New York law on carry permits for guns and Maryland had to stop enforcing one of its gun laws because of it.

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