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Arizona artists win suit over same-sex wedding invitations
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a local nondiscrimination ordinance violated two Christian wedding invitation calligraphers’ free speech.
PHOENIX — The free speech rights of two Christian artists who make wedding invitations were violated by an anti-discrimination ordinance in Phoenix that makes it illegal to refuse service to same-sex couples for religious reasons, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The 4-3 decision reversed lower-court rulings favoring the city.
The state Supreme Court said its ruling is limited to only the creation of custom wedding invitations by Joanna Duka and Breanna Koski and isn’t a blanket exemption from the ordinance for all their business operations.
The artists, who believe a marriage should be between only a man and woman, had argued that the ordinance would violate their religious beliefs by forcing them to custom-make products for same-sex marriage ceremonies.
The high court said the city can’t force them to make same-sex wedding invitations.
“Duka and Koski’s beliefs about same-sex marriage may seem old-fashioned, or even offensive to some,” the court majority wrote. “But the guarantees of free speech and freedom of religion are not only for those who are deemed sufficiently enlightened, advanced, or progressive. They are for everyone.”
In the dissenting opinion, the court’s minority said the case doesn’t concern the content of custom wedding products but instead pertains to the identity of customers.
“Today’s decision is also deeply troubling because its reasoning cannot be limited to discrimination related to same-sex marriage or based on the beliefs of any one religion, but instead extends more broadly to other claims of a ‘right’ by businesses to deny services to disfavored customers,” the opinion states.
The majority ruling said the city and dissenting justices claimed that if the court were to dare to let the artists express their beliefs, “we, in essence, run the risk of resurrecting the Jim Crow laws of the Old South.”
Lawyers for the city are examining potential grounds for an appeal.
Mayor Kate Gallego, a Democrat, emphasized that the ordinance remains in effect.
“I want to be clear: The city of Phoenix does not and will not tolerate hate in any form,” Gallego said. “That doesn’t change with today’s ruling, and we will not stop with our fight.”
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, finding thst state’s civil rights commission showed anti-religious bias when it ruled against the baker for refusing to make the cake.
The Supreme Court decision, however, didn’t address the larger issue of whether a business can invoke religious objections to refuse service to gay and lesbian people.
An Arizona state law that bars discrimination by businesses doesn’t include sexual orientation as a protected class. Phoenix, Tempe, Flagstaff and Tucson have passed ordinances banning businesses from discriminating on that basis.
So far, Phoenix hasn’t taken any enforcement actions stemming from the ban.
A lawyer representing the Arizona artists portrayed the state high court ruling as a sweeping victory, even though the justices limited their ruling to custom wedding invitations.
“Regardless of one’s view on marriage, this is a win for all citizens of Arizona, because a government that can crush Joanna and Breanna can crush any one of us” said Jonathan Scruggs, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative advocacy organization that brought the case.
Scruggs acknowledged the ruling doesn’t automatically protect other business owners, who would need to seek their own court order to avoid running afoul of the nondiscrimination ordinances in Phoenix or other Arizona cities.
Jenny Pizer, law and policy director for the LGBTQ-rights group Lambda Legal, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the city’s position, said that the ruling was troubling.
“The court misguidedly has concluded that free speech protections allow businesses to express anti-gay religious views by denying particular custom-design services to customers because of who they are,” Pizer said.
Article via NBCNews
Infowars host Alex Jones to be deposed in defamation suit brought by Sandy Hook parents
Article via NBCNews
Infowars host Alex Jones to be deposed in defamation suit brought by Sandy Hook parents
Discussions on Jones’ web show have called the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre a hoax, and lawsuits by families of eight victims and a first responder say they’ve been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’ followers.
The superior court judge also ruled Wednesday that the families can depose several other defendants in the case, including those critical to Infowars’ business operations.
Jones has defended the discussions on his show. He has cited First Amendment rights and says he believes the shooting happened.
Judge rules against elderly lesbians rejected from retirement home
Bev Nance, 68, and Mary Walsh, 72, were denied an apartment in Missouri’s Friendship Village because their marriage is not “understood in the Bible.”
A federal court on Wednesday ruled against a lesbian couple who brought a lawsuit against a Missouri retirement home that rejected the women’s apartment application because their marriage is not “understood in the Bible.”
Bev Nance, 68, and Mary Walsh, 72, married a decade ago in Massachusetts and have been in a committed relationship for roughly 40 years.
When they applied to move into the Friendship Village senior living facility, they did so “because it is in their community, they have friends there, and it offers services that would allow them to stay together there for the rest of their lives,” said Julie Wilensky, an attorney representing the couple.
But once Friendship Village staff found that Nance and Walsh are married, they told the couple that they were not allowed to move in, because the home did not condone homosexuality. The letter they received said that the only married couples they accepted were those in unions between “one man and one woman.”
The couple sued, alleging “discrimination on the basis of sex,” and their case was finally decided this week by a federal court in Missouri, which found “sexual orientation rather than sex lies at the heart of Plaintiffs’ claims.”
LGBTQ groups decried the outcome, and the couple’s lawyers said “we disagree with the court’s decision, and our clients are considering next steps.”
Michael Adams, CEO of SAGE, which advocates for LGBTQ seniors, said, “This is sex discrimination, and it is against the law.”
“Mary Walsh and Bev Nance were discriminatorily denied admission to the Friendship Village retirement community for one reason only — because they are two women in a committed relationship rather than a woman and a man,” Adams told NBC News.
The couple’s lawyers made that argument in court: that because Walsh and Nance are women who are in a relationship with a woman instead of a man as is traditional, they would not have been prevented from moving in if their sex were male.
Judge Jean C. Hamilton, however, provided a different view of the case’s merits.
“At no time do Plaintiffs assert that had they been men involved in a same-sex relationship or marriage, they would have been admitted as residents in Friendship Village,” Hamilton wrote in the court’s decision. “Under these circumstances, the Court finds the claims boil down to those of discrimination based on sexual orientation rather than sex alone.”
Hamilton then dismissed the women’s claim, noting that the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Missouri and other Midwestern states, ruled in 1989 that existing federal civil rights law “does not prohibit discrimination against homosexuals.”
The case Hamilton referred to, Williamson v. A.G. Edwards & Sons, is currently being challenged in court by the LGBTQ legal advocacy group Lambda Legal. The group is representing a man whose job offer was rescinded after the company found out he is gay. This case, Horton v. Midwest Geriatric Management, could be decided this year, and if the 1989 precedent is overturned, discrimination against LGBTQ people would become illegal at the federal level in all the states in the 8th Circuit: North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas.
The Supreme Court is also considering whether to take up one or several appeals court cases that address whether “sex” discrimination bans in federal civil rights law include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. There is currently a patchwork of mismatching laws across the U.S. regarding this issue.
Article via NBCNews
Trump demands Mexico send migrants back to countries of origin after border patrol fires tear gas
Trump tweeted Monday that Mexican officials should remove migrants from the border by airplane, bus or “any way you want.”
President Donald Trump tweeted Monday that Mexican officials should ship the thousands of Central American migrants seeking entry into the U.S. back to their countries of origin by any means necessary, claiming that “many” are “stone cold criminals.”
Trump suggested that Mexico send the migrants back to countries such as Guatemala and Honduras by airplane, bus, or “anyway you want.” The president also threatened to shut down the U.S. Southern Border “permanently” if needed.
The tweet comes after U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials fired tear gas on hundreds of migrants who sought to enter the U.S. on Sunday near San Diego. That interaction led to U.S. officials shutting down the San Ysidro Port of Entry between San Diego and Tijuana for more than six hours.
In a statement, border patrol said it used tear gas and pepper spray after several migrants tossed rocks at agents, who were struck. No injuries were reported.
“DHS will not tolerate this type of lawlessness and will not hesitate to shut down ports of entry for security and public safety reasons,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a Sunday statement.
Some migrants, meanwhile, said they sought to cross over illegally after they were denied access at the port of entry, where they could claim asylum. It is not illegal to seek asylum.
The hundreds of migrants who assembled along the Mexican side of the border on Sunday morning were a part of a larger group of about 6,000 who crammed into shelters in Tijuana. Many of the migrants are fleeing violence in their home countries.
Article via NBCNews