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Eugene

(61,595 posts)
Wed Sep 13, 2017, 07:53 PM Sep 2017

The Justice Department goes out of its way to side against a gay couple

Source: Washington Post

The Justice Department goes out of its way to side against a gay couple

By Editorial Board September 13 at 7:32 PM

SHOULD A Colorado baker have the right to turn away a gay couple seeking a custom wedding cake if he disapproves of their upcoming marriage? According to the Justice Department, the answer is yes.

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments over the conduct of this unwilling baker in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Though the federal government isn’t a party to the case, the Justice Department has made a point of weighing in on the side of Jack Phillips, the “cake artist” whose religious opposition to same-sex marriage led him to refuse to design a cake for a gay couple. (The pair eventually obtained a rainbow-layered cake.)

The Justice Department’s legal brief has — rightly — faced criticism from civil rights groups appalled by the government’s argument that Mr. Phillips’s religious beliefs grant him a constitutional right to discriminate against gay customers, despite a Colorado public-accommodations law prohibiting unequal treatment on the basis of sexual orientation. Indeed, the brief is a dispiriting signal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s priorities. The government went out of its way to side with Mr. Phillips, but it has been quiet on any number of other significant cases before the Supreme Court this term.

In one sense, the Justice Department has clarified the stakes. The brief frames the case as a matter of free expression rather than free exercise of Mr. Phillips’s religious beliefs. That’s because Masterpiece Cakeshop isn’t really a religious-freedom case at all — though Mr. Phillips’s attorneys do point to their client’s constitutional rights on that front. Because Colorado lacks legislation raising the standard for state infringement on religious belief — unlike many states and the federal government — Mr. Phillips is left with what’s likely a losing argument.

-snip-


Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-justice-department-goes-out-of-its-way-to-side-against-a-gay-couple/2017/09/13/1055b664-9808-11e7-87fc-c3f7ee4035c9_story.html
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The Justice Department goes out of its way to side against a gay couple (Original Post) Eugene Sep 2017 OP
Religious zealots and republicans must create enemy groups lambchopp59 Sep 2017 #1

lambchopp59

(2,809 posts)
1. Religious zealots and republicans must create enemy groups
Sat Sep 16, 2017, 01:37 PM
Sep 2017

Much like Donald Trump demonizes the free press when it does not suit his desires. Must it take another round of ruthless crusades, creating and re-creating definitions of immorality to keep power? It appears their most effective tool at keeping their flocks convinced that their crusade is actually some twist of the ways of a cruel and jealous god. Aimed at the vulnerable, and rendering the financially powerful faultless and placed onto pedestals.
The notion of unquestioning followers of the likes of Joel Osteen, once somewhat sadly hoodwinked, yet some still undoubtedly in submission even after the cold-blooded act of shutting out flood refugees sickens me. Could it be avoidance of embarrassment by those invested spiritually and financially that keeps them in ignorance?
Fear. Yes we as liberals (if I may be so bold) do fear mobilization well armed RW marauding hoardes. We see the evidence of misguided revolutionaries with an easy search of their web domains. I fear this sort more than even in the shadow of Charlottesville, indeed truly nauseated that such could find the likes of the murderer there as a role model. Their bullets and out of assault vehicles are very real, driving around terrorizing some only because they have a Hillary 2016 sticker.
And all many of us possess is a comparative enlightenment such as Osteen followers refuse. Yet I find even such constrained, often by financial divide, titles and predestined status, and can be counterproductive to a greater mass following, ergo, their slinging of the term "elitist" as a derogatory term.
Once us LGBT have been properly demonized and subjugated, and the next group and the next...

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