False equivalence, he's not being forced to do anything.
Lady is a shit stain let's be clear but she is well within her rights to refuse service to anyone on any grounds. in fact her being honest about her bigotry is a good thing as it allows others to avoid her.
her rights to refuse service to anyone on any grounds
Usually true, except when it comes to discrimination against people of protected class for being under that protected class, which is why this ruling is so concerning.
The reality is that this sort of discrimination happens all the time under the guise of other rationale and is hard to stamp out (see: real estate redlining, gerrymandering, employment and rental discrimination, etc.), but theoretically a disenfranchised person with documentation can still seek recourse under the law.
This ruling (as well as the general apprehension around queer people living publicly) has laid the groundwork for christofascism to further underclass those (and other marginalized) communities and makes the violent rhetoric coming from "family values" white supremacist extremists more palatable to the public.
It is incredibly dangerous and further damages whatever remains of SCOTUS' credibility.
The first amendment is the thing you're missing with all of this. People can discriminate against gay people. But only if it takes away their first amendment. The courts ruled that art should not be forced. So they don't have to serve gay people. But if someone is selling a car, that has nothing to do with art.
It is not a protected class at the federal level. It is in many states.
However, part of the argument in favor of making same sex marriage a right, as ordered in Obergefell, so that no state can refuse to marry same sex couples, is that the only difference between an opposite sex couple and a same sex couple is the sex of one of the people. Hence, the discrimination is on the basis of sex, which is a protected class federally.
Why that same argument wouldn't apply to the more recent web designer case is beyond me.
Why that same argument wouldn’t apply to the more recent web designer case is beyond me.
Ahh, about that, well… welcome to the new Robert’s Court, where the facts are made up and the precedent doesn’t matter.
From courtroom to Congress, it seems these days conservatives only look at getting things their way, with consequences & the nation at large be damned. At times there’s startlingly little ideological consistency being proffered to justify their actions, and sometimes they even punish other conservatives to force getting their way (see recent rejection of a multitude of bills in Texas because the governor didn’t get his favored legislation through, for instance). I don’t see how this can be kept up long term… it’s like venture capitalism has infected the government and we’re working on burning out all the assets still.
Homophobes hate gay people because of their sex. Not them having sex, but that they are the same sex and Ina relationships ship.
Sex is a protected class in the US, so logically sexuality would be covered by any common sense reading of the law.
Also the SCOTUS decision is pure bullshit as any creative work I causing commercial business is creative work and the free speech justification is bullshit.
Sex is a protected class. There's no discrimination against gay or trans people that is not inherently discrimination based on sex. So no, it is absolutely a protected class.
Conservatives just allow their hatred of queer people to easily, easily, easily overcome their desire to appear to respect the law.
and being a lying pos doesnt give you standing. but here we are commenting on a case where someone lied to have standing and now rights are being eroded away.
They literally just said they think that's OK. You don't need to ask. This person thinks it's perfectly fine for a business to refuse service for any reason. They think it's fine to refuse service for nationality, race, gender, religion, disability, social caste, physical attractiveness, or whatever.
Which in the US us explicitly illegal as clearly outlined in civil rights legislation, but the current court would probably throw that out too as long as the person discriminating is a white Christian.
I 100% disagree with the ruling, but this is apparently what the court had to say. They effectively sectioned out "expressive services" as able to discriminate, versus non-expressive services, like restaurants , which are still covered by the first amendment.
The decision suggests that artists, photographers, videographers and writers are among those who can refuse to offer what the court called expressive services if doing so would run contrary to their beliefs. But that’s different from other businesses not engaged in speech and therefore not covered by the First Amendment, such as restaurants and hotels.
That distinction is horsecrap. A hotel manager can be forced to offer their wedding package for a gay wedding and a chef can be forced to cook for a gay wedding because they run venues that have been declared "nonexpressive" by 6 people who don't know the first thing about those professions. But a website designer cannot be forced to sell websites while running a website shop.
They don't believe in that distinction. They're just taking a step towards outright illegalizing queerness. They'll tear down that separation as soon as doing so can result in more discrimination.
Apparently you can be too queer for this lady to make your website, bit the cake decorator, DJ, caterer, wedding planner, dress designer and everyone else involved aren't real artists.
The conservative justices declaring which jobs do and don't show human creativity and expression was not on my Christofascist dystopia bingo card, but probably should've been.
You sweet summer child, how can you possibly think Obergefell isn't going to get challenged and killed by these same anti-queer justices?
Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas wrote the dissent to it. Gay marriage would still be federally unprotected if they had their way, and they have since netted 2 more allies to their cause to make it happen.
Is cooking not an expressive service... what about a really good mechanic with some flair... it Def covers lawyers and would most likely apply to ER nurses and doctors... this is fucked when you follow it to their intended conclusion...
Here's the thing. Her business isn't real. There is no "wedding website" business model and the person she alleged asked her to make a website for his gay wedding is straight and has been married to a woman for 15 years. This entire sham business exists for the sole purpose to get the court to rule against Colorado's anti-discrimination laws.
I am surprised that this is not being talked about more. It's a fake case, the situation never happened, some cash changed hands and our sham of a court made this ruling to set a precedent.
100% this. I read the article about the fake request for service a couple of days before I switched to kbin. it was really incomprehensible to me that the supreme Court would even hear the case given the false allegations. it was just to set the precedent.
Except for the fact that nobody was actually asking her to do a website for gay couple. The client she named in the suit isn't gay and is already marries and is a web designer.
It was a bullshit case put in front of the supreme court just so they can attack gay people again. The supreme court wants to disenfranchise gays, trans, women and other minorities.
Now California needs to make a law that any books that have a sexual content rating cannot be sold to public schools. Vendors can then choose between which state they want to sell.
TransitCenter, a transit advocacy group, found in a 2018 survey of riders with household incomes below $35,000 in eight major cities that frequency, safety, crowding and reliability were higher priorities than bus fare.
Maybe I’m missing something, but if they’re surveying people who are already riders, then OF COURSE fare isn’t their biggest complaint. They’re not getting feedback from people who want to use public transit, but can’t afford to.
The information gathered from this survey is still valuable, but shouldn’t be used as an argument for or against free public transit.
I live in Tacoma, Washington, and we also just put into effect that no one under 18 needs to pay for public transit. It’s entirely free with a special Orca card. It seems like the whole state is on the path to making it free for everyone some day.
Defecto “free” ridership has really hurt the local public transport system in the SF Bay Area.
Quite a lot of people refuse to take public transit due to risks of being harassed or witnessing open drug use. Easy to dismiss that as a guy personally, but I definitely think that creates an environment that’s hostile to many people who need to use or would otherwise be using public transit.
On the other hand, Margerite bus at Stanford has been free for decades, and it’s never been a significant issue there.
So it’s very difficult to generalize across different systems that have their own unique issues.
We have free transit in Albuquerque. It’s basically turned into a rolling homeless shelter. They hired security to manage it. My dad was one of those. He was attacked by someone using drugs on the bus and had the back of his hand bit off in a brutal attack. The busses here are VERY dangerous and I’d never step foot on one again.
I ride the Albuquerque buses to and from work. The worst I’ve seen is an intoxicated guy being thrown off by the driver. I’ve also seen a couple people kicked off for riding a full route, which I guess is how they keep people from riding all day. For reference, I’m a smallish woman, usually carrying a messenger bag. I’ve never been bothered.
What happened to @Dandylion’s dad is horrifying, though. That is exactly the kind of stuff that keeps me off public transit as well. “It never happened to me” isn’t really a valid argument.
I was thinking more like that solving the homelessness problem needs to be a part of improving public transit, and cities in general. Nothing made me want a personal vehicle more than being forced to ride public transit. Every day I’d look at the people passing us by in cars and say to myself “One day, that is gonna be me!”
It’s true that you’ll probably see something unpleasant on public transit once in a while but most folks aren’t going to share the experience of someone who is literally tasked with engaging with and managing the people causing problems on the bus.
It’s unfortunate though because in my experience transit feels a lot more pleasant when there are at least a decent amount of people riding with you. When people start to feel unsafe and stop riding, it can drive further people away if they have other transportation options.
Eeh? I’m a woman, I don’t have this problem on transit at all, either in Chicagoland or in SF. First of all, witnessing open drug use isn’t, like, the end of the world; it might make you uncomfortable, but it’s not dangerous.
Being harassed is a real fear, but I find that I’m more often harassed while I’m just walking around than in a bus, train, or the muni, and when I’m on board transit there are cameras and an operator to potentially step in!
Public transit is a public good. If seeing poor people and drug users makes us uncomfortable, the solution is to address the root causes of poverty and addiction, not to force poor people off of public transit.
You might not, and neither do I have a problem with it. I grew up low income and rode plenty of “sketchy” bus lines where fights would break out. I know when to remove yourself from danger.
Plenty of people I know have, or at least have that perception. My S/Os parents visited from out of the country, and they were harassed by someone screaming racist epithets at them and got scared, and ended up taking Uber the rest of the time they were here. They are old, retired, and we didn’t want to risk them getting uncomfortable. Obviously we have the privilege of doing that, but not everyone does.
Again, it’s not about being poor, it’s about antisocial behavior that destroys the public spaces. That goes for rich assholes too.
Statements like that are why I tend to follow the idea that any government service should be provided to every citizen equally without exception.
We spend so much money in the US trying to make sure only the “correct” people are receiving things like welfare or Medicaid. If we just dropped the restrictions we’d likely be fairly close to being able to afford covering everybody with those programs.
This is exactly what Luxembourg did with their public transit recently. They realized they were spending more in upkeep/salaries/HR/computer systems/policy/etc, and just ripped it all out, and made it free.
That’s the reasoning behind an Universal Basic Income system: deciding who needs financial aid and who doesn’t, is more expensive than just giving everyone a fixed monthly payment and calling it a day.
That is, except for those who think nobody should get anything for free, and are trying to rip out the aid systems altogether.
They do that regardless of whether there are fares. In my neck of the woods, the suburbanites have fought like hell against installing light rail to connect downtown with the greater metro area because they’re worried about the “crime train”. Who cares if it would improve commuting for the majority of the population?
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