The Supreme Court of the United States returned this Friday to wield its overwhelming conservative majority by agreeing with an evangelical graphic designer, Lorie Smith, who refuses to create web pages for weddings of homosexual couples. As was quite predictable, the six right-wing magistrates voted in favor of the ruling while the three progressives voted against it.
Smith sued the state of Colorado in 2016 to challenge the anti-discrimination provisions of the state’s civil rights law to limit his creative services to heterosexual couples.
With writing by conservative Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court established that the First Amendment to the US Constitution -on freedom of religion and expression- prohibits Colorado from forcing the plaintiff to “create expressive designs that convey messages with which she disagrees.” .
The progressive judge Sonia Sotomayor issued a dissenting opinion, to which the other two progressive judges joined, to point out with some irony that, with its ruling, the court “grants a business open to the public the constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.
President Joe Biden, upon learning of the sentence, was “deeply concerned” at the prospect that the ruling “involves greater discrimination against LGTBI Americans.”
In the president’s opinion, the Supreme Court ruling “weakens” all laws against discrimination based on gender, color or religion.
The “disappointing” resolution, Biden said in a statement, “undermines” the idea and the “basic truth” that “no one should be discriminated against for who they are or for loving who they love.” On top of that, the ruling “painfully” coincides with what is celebrated here as LGTBI Pride Month, he added.
The president vowed to coordinate with states across the country “to fight attempts to roll back civil rights protections that could follow this ruling.” And he invited Congress to launch and approve an Equality Law that protects the rights of that community.
