According to micky <
[email protected]>:
If you purport to run a business open to the public, you can't
discriminate against people on the basis of sex, which has been
interpreted to include sexual orientation.
Unless such a ban would conflict with the First Amendment, which takes >precedence over statutes.
Equal protection is the 14th Amendment. The usual rule when two laws
conflict is that the more recent one takes precedence. There were some
1961 SCOTUS cases someone else mentioned that upheld Sunday closing
blue laws, Braunfeld v. Brown and McGowan v. Maryland. The court
dodged the issue by assuming that the laws had a secular as well as
religious purpose, but there were some pretty tart dissents.
It's the same reason you can't refuse to serve Blacks.
It's the same reason but the conflic is not present, since there is no >religious distinction between Blacks and non-Blacks.
Oh, my. The world in general and the US in particular has a very long
and unpleasant history of religiously sanctioned racism. The split
between the Northern and Southern Baptists was because the northerners
didn't approve of slavery, and the Southern Baptists found a Biblical justification for it. The LDS (Mormon) church did not allow Blacks in
their leadership until 1978 and many of their conservative offshoots
still do not. This was all too typical.
Since the 1960s overt racism has become a lot less socially and
legally acceptable, but it seems just a matter of time until the
Alito-Thomas court takes a challenge from someone who has a sincere
religious belief that Blacks are the spawn of Ham and refuses to
deal with them.
My example was not chosen to find another protected class, but was meant
to illustrate that being forced to write something one seriously
disagrees with is an infringement on one's freedom. You do agree, do
you not, that in both cases, the gay wedding and the nazi, it's an >infringement on the baker's freedom.
We're talking about expression on the order of "Congratulations Betsy
and Sally" written on the cake. That is not significant expression
other than under the most strained and motivated interpretation, so
no, I do not.
--
Regards,
John Levine,
[email protected], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail.
https://jl.ly
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