This was long overdue, and I should have made it per day when the supreme court did these cases. But oh well, it’s all under one megathread. This will be active for a couple of days.
The Roberts Court is the worst since the Taney Court. Citizens United cemented that legacy a decade ago, and it’s only been downhill from there. The question now is whether they’ll be the first openly fascist court.
And all as their various bribes are becoming public. Corrupt and evil and provably so. They took the money and sold out the rule of law.
That the court threw out affirmative action on the same day it struck down student loan forgiveness… well, these things are more closely related than you might think.
Up until the Civil Rights acts were passed, state colleges were publicly funded, virtually free to students- higher education was very much seen as a public good- but while segregation was legal college was tacitly only for white people. When segregation was struck down, funding for those colleges was cut and tuition costs were shifted to students- this was explicitly about pricing poor (more to the point, black and brown) people out of colleges now that they couldn’t discriminate on the basis of race.
The high cost your children will pay to go to college was never necessary, it was deliberately done to price minorities out of college
It’s not just about minorities, although it is about that.
This is about keeping the masses out of universities so that only children of the elite can attend and to isolate them from ever interacting with anyone outside their class. Those children are white because our elites are white, of course, but it’s really a one-two punch. The goal is a consolidation of power and privilege, to ensure that anyone who goes to the “right” schools is of the “right” sort.
Of course the cowards released these decisions on the Friday before a 4 day weekend for most. I know it’s common practice but moves like that make it so clear that they know they’re being shitty and are trying to bury the news
Then general state of the country has me very concerned. Only thing I can do is try to educate and vote.
PS: glad to have a new politics community to visit since I left reddit
Can someone TLDR the LGBT case? I heard something about legal business discrimination but that’s all I know.
A Christian website designer sued so she wouldn’t have to make sites for LGBTQ+ weddings. The court said she can refuse, citing religious freedom. It was a 6-3 vote.
Also, it seems the web designer that sued basically made it all up. The designer didn’t have any same-sex clients. She didn’t receive any requests from gay couples to work on their wedding websites. But it doesn’t matter the court ruled that she can legally discriminate anyway.
She was also not a web designer lol. Insane ruling by the SCOTUS, totally ignoring standing. Same issue with the student debt relief overturning. This court does not care about standing at all and is willing to throw out that most basic principle of law for the purpose of their judicial activism.
This may create a sort of pseudoreligious legal arms race. One group will arbitrarily take away rights based on “their religion,” as has happened today, and another will attempt to recreate those rights under their own “religious” banner, as the church of satan has attempted. “Religion” will end up a focal point, regardless of the outcome, and fundamentalists win.
I have a feeling that if the church of Satan or whatever tried pushing a case under the banner of religious freedom, this court would just introduce some litmus test for which religions and believers qualify for protection under law and which do not (using originalism as a shield). And if that were to happen, I think we can confidently say that they’d find some way to implement a test that discriminated against minority beliefs in the US (e.g Islam, Hindu, atheism, indigenous faiths, etc.), further codifying the erosion of constitutional protections. I dunno, I’m obviously not a legal scholar, but I think this court is getting pretty easy to predict at this point.
A website designer refused to make a website for a gay wedding couple, citing that homosexual relationship are against their religious beliefs. The state had laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexuality and in a lawsuit tried to force the designer to make the website. The Supreme Court decided 6-3 that religious beliefs are more important and the state can’t force someone do do business against their religious beliefs and that doing so would be a violation of free speech by forcing someone to make speech.
It’s important to point out that the entire story behind the case was fabricated. There was no gay couple asking for anything. It was all garbage used to erode LGBTQ+ rights.
This whole case has me asking questions- who hires a web designer to build them a website for their wedding? People with an extra few grand sitting around on top of the costs of having a wedding? I’m going with: nobody. Nobody makes a website for their wedding when they could just post about it on social media for free.
This is the stupidest timeline.