this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Malicious Compliance
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I'm out of the loop, what did the SCOTUS do now?
https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/06/supreme-court-rules-website-designer-can-deny-same-sex-couples-service/
We can discriminate against Republicans legally and with blessings.
Republican is not a protected class, you have always been able to do that.
They basically said a business can discriminate. The case in question was by a bakery that didn’t want to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. SCOTUS said that was ok.
The kicker is that the claims put forth in the lawsuit by the bakery may be based on lies. The man they claimed wanted the cake isn’t gay, is already married, never ordered from the bakery, and didn’t even know he was mentioned in the court case until a reporter contacted him for comment.
This case is a web designer for wedding websites, not a bakery. The bakery thing was several years ago now.
Both rulings cute the same fundamental precedent: "expressive works"/"expressive goods" — that is, services that entail some act of creative work and/or speech, generally in endorsement.
For example, to take a less-favorable position as an example, a web designer could under this ruling post as terms of their services that they do not design websites for anyone connected with a Baptist church, because designing websites for them would require the designer to write speech and create designs participating in what the designer considered bigoted. If a Baptist group sued on these grounds, and the government said "no, you must take them on as clients", the government would be coercing a particular kind of speech from this web designer — that is, the government would be forcing the web designer to, by court order, write that speech they see as clearly bigoted.
A grocery store could not, however, say "we won't sell groceries to anyone from a Baptist church", because selling someone a gallon of milk or whatever else off the store shelves does not involve participating in any of their speech. If a grocery store did so, and a Baptist group sued, and the government said "no, you must sell them groceries", the government is not coercing any sort of speech from the grocery store owner.
That's the crux of the issue here: not Jim-Crow "we don't sell groceries to coloreds" baseline discrimination against people, but instead trying to walk the line of not using lawsuits as a weapon to coerce someone to participate in some viewpoint.
I thought it was about designing a website not baking a cake
There was a previous case that said the cake shop couldn't discriminate. The court threw out that precedent and let the web designer discriminate.
Makes sense, I think I remember reading about that case a bit ago. Maybe the court is trying split hairs between content generation and modification. With these cases though, both are so intertwined that there's a huge grey area that could be argued either way to the point that ruling for either side would still have arguments against.
They could also just have no idea that the changes for same-sex vs different to the website design should be more or less topical and the underlying code wouldn't really be different. Actually... Pretty much just like changing the frosting color from pink to blue, or green.
Either way, this whole discrimination thing for something you don't believe in just needs to be dropped.
The court is simply throwing out precedent to allow discrimination just like they threw out precedent to allow state abortion bans. It's not about legal hair splitting or any kind of logic, just pushing their right wing extremist agenda.
Scarcely. Read the majority opinion. It specifically carves out an exception for "creative works" (or whatever the exact term is, I honestly don't remember) which in effect says that you cannot be forced by law to create something that espouses a position or creed with which you disagree.
As of right now I don't have a strong opinion on the ruling either way, but I think it's worth getting what it says right before we condemn it.
I lean towards thinking that it makes distinctions with which I agree, but I'm going to withhold judgement until I learn more about the arguments and we have a better sense of how it's going to play out in practice.
The Supreme Court is a fucking joke, none of their opinions deserve serious consideration. They're nothing but right wing ideologues pursuing their racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-worker agenda.
I thought it was about designing a website not baking a cake