CT Blue

This is sort of a follow up to one my recent posts, in which I wondered what type of pretzel logic the Supreme Court would use to reject a case brought by Jews who claimed that they had a right to abortion services as their religion does not hold that life begins at conception. So, here’s another case discussed at Lawyers, Guns & Money:

A restaurant in Richmond last week canceled a reservation for a private event being held by a conservative Christian organization, citing the group’s opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion rights.

“We have always refused service to anyone for making our staff uncomfortable or unsafe and this was the driving force behind our decision,” read an Instagram post from Metzger Bar and Butchery, a German-influenced restaurant in the Union Hill neighborhood whose kitchen is helmed by co-owner Brittanny Anderson, a veteran of TV cooking shows including “Top Chef” and “Chopped.” “Many of our staff are women and/or members of the LGBTQ+ community. All of our staff are people with rights who deserve dignity and a safe work environment. We respect our staff’s established rights as humans and strive to create a work environment where they can do their jobs with dignity, comfort and safety.”

…

I mean, if it’s all about personal values and freedom and such, why can’t we just refuse to serve Christians if we find them outrageous to our value system? I do however await the legal “logic” by which the Supreme Court finds this illegal but refusing to serve gays totally legal.

I’ve read a bit more about the court’s deliberations in the case in which it just heard arguments, so I’ll predict the “logic” they’d employ.

The case they just heard involves a website designer who has never been asked to design a wedding website for a gay couple, but brought a preemptive action seeking to enjoin the state from maybe applying an anti-discrimination law to her just in case anyone ever asked her to design such a page. In the olden days (5 or 10 years ago) the case would have been dismissed for lack of standing, but times have changed.

The court will likely rule that requiring her to design such a site (even though she apparently just sells pre-made templates) would violate her rights of free speech, as it would in essence be requiring her to engage in speech (designing the website) in which she does not want to engage. In the case of the restaurant, it will be easy enough for them to rule that there’s no speech involved, that they are merely selling a product and they aren’t allowed to discriminate among potential customers for that product based on religion, race, or sex. They’d be right, by the way, so far as the restaurant goes, but they’d still be wrong about the web site designer. Their problem, of course, is that such a decision would also bar anti-LGBT bigots from denying restaurant services to gay folks, so they’d have to come up with some anticipatory logic to allow that.

I should add that if the anti-LGBT case came to them first, they could easily find that speech was in fact involved, since the restaurant could argue that merely allowing the group to meet there could be considered an endorsement by the restaurant of their lifestyle, etc. But that same logic would apply to the fundamentalist Christian group, so if they were to bar the gay folks first they’d have a tougher time when the Christians showed up.