Opinion by George F. Will: The Supreme Court's decision potentially sweeps broadly, beyond considerations of religion and gay rights.
The court’s six conservatives supported Smith. The three liberals dissented, arguing that Colorado’s public accommodations law regulated Smith’s conduct, not her speech.Carving exemptions from neutral laws of general applicability should be done rarely, reluctantly, and delicately.
The court says government cannot compel a vendor to create products that are both “customized” and “expressive” when the vendor objects to the message that would be conveyed by the product. Smith, Carpenter notes, is “not selling grilled cheese sandwiches at a lunch counter.” Her websites envision collaboration with each customer, using Smith’s words and designs.Most businesses, goods and services will pose no challenge to any public accommodations law.
Cases like Smith’s raise some nonlegal, moral questions about living in America’s current climate of contentiousness, beginning with: Would not American life be more congenial if people who believe that some behaviors, although legal, are reprehensible would accept that some people are going to do those things, and that providing a publicly advertised commercial service that facilitates those things does not express the provider’s moral...
Another question concerning congeniality: Why would a same-sex couple choose to compel the involvement in their joyous day of a vendor who is hostile to what they are celebrating, when there are alternative vendors offering similar services? The gay rights movement’s original live-and-let-live spirit has become curdled by a bullying impulse that reflects the truculence of many moralists nowadays.
Finally: Would all the conservative justices have so adamantly defended Smith’s speech rights against the luminous and hard-won public accommodations principle if the likelihood of state coercion were not so symptomatic of today’s culture of silencing and canceling?
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