Judge Uses Supreme Court's Gay Wedding Website Ruling for Her Own Anti-LGBTQ Lawsuit [View all]
We said the recent Supreme Court ruling in favor of a Colorado wedding website designer opposed to same-sex clients was going to be a civil rights disaster, and the fallout is already well underway.
A Waco, Texas, judge who has refused to perform same-sex weddings was publicly warned in 2019 for violating Texas’ code of judicial conduct. McLennan County Justice of the Peace Dianne Hensley then sued the state, claiming that the warning violated state law by punishing her for acting in accordance with her religious faith and “substantially burdened” her free exercise of religion.
Back in Texas, Hensley’s lawyer is none other than Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of Texas’ bounty hunter abortion ban known as S.B. 8 and counsel for the Texas man suing his ex-wife’s friends for allegedly helping her obtain abortion pills. Unsurprisingly, Mitchell opposes gay rights and said in a Supreme Court brief that Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that legalized marriage equality, is a court-invented right that is just “as lawless as Roe [v. Wade].” He also attacks LGBTQ rights more broadly: In 2018, Mitchell represented a group seeking exemptions to anti-discrimination rules so they could refuse to hire LGBTQ people it if countered their religious beliefs and he’s the lawyer arguing that insurance shouldn’t have to cover PrEP drugs.
With S.B. 8, Mitchell got the Supreme Court to nullify Roe and render it fully meaningless in Texas before officially overturning it. It seems he and anti-LGBTQ activists are attempting to do the same now to Obergefell and other civil rights laws—and it should terrify everyone.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/judge-uses-supreme-court-gay-173000254.html
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