AZ Attorney General Flouts SCOTUS Ruling On Free Speech
In a resounding victory for free speech, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that a web designer could not be compelled to create a wedding site for a gay couple if doing so would violate his religious values.
The broad decision could impact various other industries, which has clearly aggravated leftists who have interpreted the precedent as an attack on LGBT rights.
For her part, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has vowed that she will look for all possible ways to circumvent the “woefully misguided” ruling.
In her response to Friday’s 6-3 decision, the Democratic official insisted that her office would keep implementing the state’s public accommodation law to the “fullest extent” and solicited complaints from anyone who believed they had been wrongfully denied service.
“Despite today’s ruling, Arizona law prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation, including discrimination because of sexual orientation and gender identity,” she declared. “If any Arizonan believes that they have been the victim of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), national origin, or ancestry in a place of public accommodation, they should file a complaint with my office.”
She went on to acknowledge that her “office is still reviewing the decision to determine its effects” while echoing liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion.
“I agree with Justice Sotomayor — the idea that the Constitution gives businesses the right to discriminate is ‘profoundly wrong,’” Mayes added.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, who sided with the majority, took aim at the minority’s opinion, writing that the dissent occasionally “gets so turned around about the facts that it opens fire on its own position.”
As one example, he cited Sotomayor’s claim “that a Colorado company cannot refuse ‘the full and equal enjoyment of [its] services’ based on a customer’s protected status” and her incongruous assertion “that a company selling creative services ‘to the public’ does have a right to decide what messages to include or not to include.’”
Gorsuch concluded: “But if that is true, what are we even debating? Instead of addressing the parties’ stipulations about the case actually before us, the dissent spends much of its time adrift on a sea of hypotheticals about photographers, stationers, and others, asking if they too provide expressive services covered by the First Amendment.”
