Supreme Court Roundup
thegavoice.comThe only thing worse than a bad ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court is a bad ruling that sets up the prospect that the worst is yet to come.
Former Solicitor General Donald Verrelli worried about that prospect a year ago when he wrote, in an essay for the American Bar Association, that the 303 Creative v.
Elenis appeal could have consequences far beyond sexual orientation discrimination. “What if, for example, [Lorie] Smith [the website designer who brought the case] had instead asserted that her religious beliefs forbade her from employing her creative abilities to celebrate an interracial marriage, or even to serve African Americans at all?” said Verrelli. “While such hypotheticals may seem far-fetched today, those are precisely the kinds of arguments that challengers to the civil rights laws made during the 1950s and 1960s.” Justice Neil Gorsuch did not mention the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – not once – in his opinion for the 6-to-3 majority June 30.
He did not contemplate the implications for interracial couples, even though two of the court’s nine justices are part of interracial marriages.
Read more on thegavoice.com