. Colorados AG Slams Made Up Case SCOTUS Used To Deny Services to LGBTQ People: License to Discriminate - News Times

Colorados AG Slams Made Up Case SCOTUS Used To Deny Services to LGBTQ People: License to Discriminate

By News Here - 16:07

Colorado’s Attorney General Phillip Weiser took on the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that a web designer couldn’t be compelled to create wedding websites for LGBTQ couples, calling the decision a “license to discriminate.”

MSNBC’s Simone Boyce asked Weiser what Justice Gorsuch meant when he wrote, “Under Colorado’s logic, the government may compel anyone who speaks for pay on a particular topic to accept all commissions on that same topic.”

“What he is trying to say is that here is someone that had a free speech interest that was being implicated in a negative way,” Weiser said. He continued:

But the problem, first off…this is a made-up case. This was based on hypotheticals, and the court didn’t have to deal with the whole equation. In a real case, you have a victim who is denied services, and the consequences of the court’s ruling would be much more self-evident. But second, let’s be clear, here; whoever creates a website, or whoever creates any artistic work can make whatever they want. Our position, they have to sell it to everyone, and they cannot restrict the sales in a public business because they don’t like someone’s ethnicity, religion, race, what have you.

Weiser said the Supreme Court’s decision poses both legal and societal challenges.

“A societal challenge because we as a society now have a choice if we have an expressive business. We can serve everyone and stand for our nation’s motto of E pluribus unum, or now, as you said, people have a license to discriminate, saying, ‘I have this expressive product and I’m not going to offer it to everybody.”

As a legal matter, Weiser said people may try to take advantage of the exception.

“And then the courts are going to have to work out what this exception means. It’s never existed before. And we’ll have to determine what is an expressive business, or how do we decide who is truly exercising some free speech right, as opposed to trying to find some illegitimate excuse for discriminating?”

Watch the MSNBC clip above.

The post Colorado’s AG Slams ‘Made Up Case’ SCOTUS Used To Deny Services to LGBTQ People: ‘License to Discriminate’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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