Q Toon: Getting Creative

The Supreme Court happily carved out a right in Creative LLC et al. v. Elenis et al. for Lorie Smith to discriminate against same-sex engaged couples, essentially nullifying a Colorado non-discrimination law.

Ignored by the right-wing justices in the majority were several factors that should have rendered the case moot. Creative LLC had not ever created any wedding announcement web pages. Furthermore, the client whose same-sex wedding announcement web page she had supposedly refused on religious grounds to design is 

• a straight, cisgender man
• in a different-sex marriage
• who never approached Creative LLC to design a web page
• who didn't know someone had done so in his name
• and besides, owns his own web design company in the first place.

Now as someone who considers himself a creative person myself, I can sympathize with not wanting to expend creative energy on a project one disagrees with. I'm not going to accept a commission to draw cartoons for nazis, racists, or antigay bigots.

I can also appreciate that the court's decision is not entirely without precedent. We've had a conservative majority court for decades now, after all. The Supremes have previously ruled that private groups such as the Boy Scouts are free to discriminate against LGBTQ+ children and parents, and so may religious groups. This case extends the right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ persons to businesses offering a public service.

But this case, along with Biden v. Nebraska (in which no student loan lending firm had sued the administration), demonstrates how the current Court is not just conservative, but activist. There was no plaintiff with standing — that is, who had suffered actual damages of some kind. You can't take a case to the Supreme Court just because you don't like a law.

For example, the budget passed by Madison Republicans representing villages and rural communities around the rest of Wisconsin last month allowed the city of Milwaukee to raise sales taxes, but dictated how the tax money must and must not be spent. I might disagree with those restrictions, but I do not live in Milwaukee. I have no standing to challenge the budget law.

Our present activist Supreme Court went out of its way to find a trumped-up case, based entirely on a fiction, and ruled in favor of a plaintiff whose primary reason for starting up her business appears to have been not to operate a business, but to overturn a non-discrimination law she didn't like.