Lewis: Be careful what you want

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We’ve all had the experience of wanting something before thinking about the consequences. At one point, I wanted to go back to my youth and remember buying a manual-transmission Mustang GT during a long commute and bumper-to-bumper ordeal in the deadly traffic of the Bay Area. increase. The car was great, but the manual transmission was a terrible choice for stop-and-go traffic. The life of the car was less than a year.

The Supreme Court is currently hearing Colorado-based website design agency 303 Creative is involved. They want to create a wedding website, but the problem is that they only want to create a site for heterosexual couples because the owner is morally against gay marriage Her argument is that gay wedding websites may require web designers to post language they disagree with morally. They argue that this constitutes “forced speech” and violates the right to free speech. Colorado attorneys argue that allowing a for-profit company to exclude gay marriage violates the state’s antidiscrimination laws.

The incident is a clear attempt to set a precedent that allows companies to deny service to certain groups of people based on differences in moral or religious beliefs. Or it might even seem just, but if a court allowed this, the consequences would be serious and would have unintended consequences that proponents probably hadn’t considered.

A generalization of what courts approve shows the impact. It looks like this: The creator or publisher of the website may, in its sole discretion, refuse service to dissenting groups for moral or religious reasons. Effectively, this allows companies to deny service to entire groups (in this case, gay couples).

This does not compel companies to publish content that is illegal, contains hate speech, or provides false/misleading information. Same-sex marriage does not fit into any of these categories. Although this particular case involves evangelical Christian “values,” the court cannot simply protect Christian values, so the ruling is not valid for any “values” an individual may have. Applies to

The “free speech” at stake here belongs to the couple getting married, not the website designer! is not the work of designers, but what I mean. They are given a basic constitutional right to block any speech they deem to be considered.If you think it’s crazy, it’s already happened As Twitter recently suspended the accounts of six major journalists without explanation.

Florida and Texas laws give citizens the right to say almost anything they want and must be rescinded immediately. Courts must mandate consistency and recognize the right of website creators to refuse transactions from parties with whom they morally disagree.

In this precedent, the creators of the website, on the basis of their differences in moral values, have defined “groups” (here gays as an example, but “gays” as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Satanists, or any other group). only.

Let’s reverse this and say 303 Creative is a liberally owned company that doesn’t want to build a wedding website for Trump supporters based on moral opposition to Trump’s views. Hopefully, regardless of your political leanings, you’ll see what a slippery slope this is.

303 The potential for exploiting a ruling in favor of Creative is almost unimaginable. So far, free speech has been restricted only when it concerns hate speech, incitement to unlawful conduct, and other limited cases. It allows discrimination by all “web creators”, including social media companies.