While not quite as momentous, attention-grabbing or as replete with historical meaning as the ruling in the affirmative action case, the U.S. Supreme Court also recently ruled in 303 Creative v. Elenis (a case I discussed previously). This was a case brought by Lorie Smith, a Christian website designer who has religious objections to designing custom websites for gay weddings, and who didn’t want to be forced by Colorado to do so. It’s a clear free speech issue: should anyone be forced to write an article, design a website or create a piece of art when they object to the message they’re being asked to convey in that article, website or artwork? Free speech advocates say “Hell no!”, while their critics (including the ACLU) characterise any objection as being tantamount to wanting to bring back “Jim Crow” laws or some such horror.
Justice Gorsuch delivered the opinion of the court in what was, as predicted, a 6–3 split along “party lines” in favour of Lorie Smith. His reasoning is lucid, compelling and succinct, and once he’d finished laying down the law, he laid into the confused and laborious dissent of Justice Sotomayor with devastating precision. One passage highlights the sheer absurdity of the left’s tangled position on this:
In some places, the dissent gets so turned around about the facts that it opens fire on its own position. For instance: While stressing that a Colorado company cannot refuse “the full and equal enjoyment of [its] services” based on a customer’s protected status, the dissent assures us that a company selling creative services “to the public” does have a right “to decide what messages to include or not to include”. But if that is true, what are we even debating? [Internal references omitted.]
There’s plenty more for the interested reader to enjoy, but looking at it more broadly, this is one of several recent rulings that seem to show the Roberts court has largely regained its sanity after a difficult period where politics seemed to overtake it. But of course, in the eyes of Democrats, the court has become illegitimate because of an “illicit rightwing” majority (illicit how?).
In fact, there have been ongoing attacks on the court and its members since the Dobbs abortion case came before it, with top Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer getting the ball rolling by apparently threatening Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, leading to a rebuke from Chief Justice Roberts. There followed the leaking of the majority opinion in Dobbs (and while we don’t know who did it, Justice Alito thinks he does), followed by numerous threats (including death and arson threats) from members of the public, after which the six conservative justices were doxxed online – leading to angry protests outside their houses, and concerns for their safety.
There have also been political attacks targeting Justices Thomas and Alito, trying (and failing) to catch them out on financial interest disclosures, and even suggesting Thomas’s wife’s legal consulting firm creates some vague conflict of interest. Perhaps they think Thomas and the others will change their legal reasoning because of threats against the court – based on an assumption that it’s all about politics and not the law? To be fair, this did happen when FDR threatened to pack the court (there’s no constitutional or statutory limit on the numbers of justices) if it didn’t sign off on the New Deal, and while Chief Justice Roberts appears to blow with the political wind, I rather doubt that of Thomas (smeared in his confirmation hearing but defiant) and Kavanaugh (ditto), at least. In fact, nothing seems to have moved the conservative justices into strange non-legal/political directions – as with Roberts in the Obamacare decision.
But maybe in 303 Creative, the activists have been up to something a bit more sneaky than these more overt attacks. You see, despite not being quite as alarming to the woke left as the end of affirmative action in universities, the outcome of this case is seen as a setback for their view of civil rights, and could be used to help overturn other “compelled speech” in the form of the mandatory use of “preferred pronouns” in the workplace, or potentially in any case where the wokerati want to force U.S. citizens to pay lip service to their version of reality. In other words, there’s considerable animus about this – which, in any case, we already knew because of the treatment meted out to the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, an almost identical case that ended up being decided on narrow technical grounds.
With all this in mind, I have a few questions about Melissa Gira Grant’s reporting in the New Republic of the fact that a document submitted by Lorie Smith to the court when the case was still at the federal district court is apparently inaccurate. Her story dropped just a day before the Supreme Court published its ruling, and was picked up almost immediately by the Guardian here in the U.K., with their U.S.-based court-watcher Sam Levine stating breathlessly:
The veracity of a key document in a major LGBTQ+ rights case before the US supreme court has come under question, raising the possibility that important evidence cited in it might be wrong or even falsified.
Typical responses on Twitter are that the entire case should be cancelled, or thrown out, or reversed, or something. Grant followed up the next day, when the ruling came out, with a piece beginning:
If the Supreme Court persists in making rulings based on fiction, how can we take any ruling seriously?
This must be a big deal, then?
No.
But first, some facts. This supposedly “key” document is a record of a request put in to Lorie Smith’s website, purportedly by a gay couple named Stewart and Mike who wanted Lorie Smith to do some design work for their wedding, including invites, placenames and possibly a website – exactly the sort of thing that Lorie Smith would have to decline, and in fact couldn’t even respond to without potentially facing immediate action from the Colorado authorities. Notably, this request via Lorie Smith’s website arrived just a day after she filed her original case in federal district court (i.e., when it became public), and is similar to the kinds of insincere requests made of Masterpiece Cakeshop that sparked that case.
However, as Melissa Gira Grant reported, the contact details given in this request were actually those of a San Francisco man who is happily married – to a woman – and who has a child (already a strong case of the notgays), and who is not planning on marrying anyone else, let alone anyone named Mike, and who was rather bemused to find out a few days ago that his name had turned up in court filings. He had no knowledge of the request: it was bogus. Yet Lorie Smith’s lawyers had used it in the district court to rebut claims that she would never be likely to receive a request to do creative work for a gay wedding (she brought this action before receiving any such requests, in anticipation of the same).
That’s all true, as far as we know, but here’s why there’s no scandal:
The first issue is that Lorie Smith and her lawyers couldn’t have known it was bogus – they had to avoid contact with this “Stewart and Mike” because any conversation could have ended up eliciting an admission that she was refusing them her custom services, which Colorado could have found out about, leading them to apply penalties and force her to attend a re-education camp. She wanted to avoid that.
Secondly, Smith and her lawyers didn’t have much incentive to create a false request in this way: her case was always based on her own intended course of conduct – which would include a statement on her website saying she wouldn’t do gay weddings – that’s prohibited by state law and which could therefore lead to Colorado taking enforcement action. It was a “pre-enforcement” lawsuit, and didn’t require that any gay wedding requests had been received, or even that they necessarily would. So if Smith wanted to fake such a request, she ought to have done so before filing her original case, and then used different legal arguments.
Thirdly, Smith and her lawyers were apparently unaware of this request during a period in which it might have been useful to them. The defence argued in district court, a month after the case began, that it should be dismissed because Smith hadn’t actually received a request for a gay wedding. Her team responded to that without citing the “Stewart and Mike” request, and it only turned up in a filing months later.
Fourthly, and most importantly, it doesn’t matter to the case. In fact, the district court (which does the fact-finding in these cases) rejected the notion that it was even a genuine gay wedding request anyway, claiming that “Stewart” and “Mike” could be girls’ names (yes, really) and so it wasn’t necessarily from a gay couple at all. The appellate court, with that fact, decided the key issue of standing on Lorie Smith’s “intended course of conduct” and her “credible fear of prosecution”, and the Supreme Court’s opinion didn’t refer to it, even obliquely, in any way. None of the legal reasoning depends on it at all. It simply doesn’t matter.
But this didn’t stop Melissa Gira Grant from claiming that “the plaintiff’s main argument rested on the claim that someday, out there, a same-sex couple would want her to design a wedding website” and that this is something gay people “have not yet done, nor ever will do”. This is not only false, it’s gaslighting. We know what happens to the sorts of businesses that are openly against gay marriage – they immediately get targeted by activists (and in fact, Lorie Smith has since received other, similar requests). But the case would stand regardless of whether that ever happened or not. Any suggestion to the contrary is disingenuous at best. It does not, as Sam Levine claims in the Guardian, undermine her standing to bring the suit, so it’s very sad that it’s being used to delegitimise the ruling (and the court), offering the chief legal officer of Lambda Legal, an “LGBTQ+” rights organisation, some cover to make statements like this:
This sort of revelation tends to reinforce to many people that the fundamentalist [!] Christian victim narrative is without foundation.
This is a classic case of The Law of Merited Impossibility, although the overall situation is also an example of Young’s Law (you’re welcome, Toby!).
Anyway, I said I had some questions about Melissa Gira Grant’s reporting of all this, which has got lefties all lathered up and looking foolish – including the former US Acting Solicitor General. The fact that the bogus request arrived the day after the original district court case was filed, and that the story about its bogosity appeared the day before the Supreme Court ruling, and the fact this has been misused to undermine that ruling, all seems a bit fishy. To be clear, I have no evidence that Ms Grant has done anything wrong, but I’m curious about her statement: “This week, I decided to call Stewart and ask him about his inquiry.”
I’m curious about it, because she doesn’t say why she decided to wade through court documents to look for Stewart’s phone number and give him a ring all of a sudden, and at this juncture. She seems to have been aware that it had been dismissed as irrelevant by the district court, so it seems like an odd thing to do. Did she receive a tip-off? Such things happen. During Covid, I received a message in my Daily Sceptic email account from an unknown person asking me to call a certain telephone number at a certain time. Intrigued, I did so, and found myself in a secret high-level military conference call, the precise details of which I can’t reveal because even members of the public are bound by the Official Secrets Act – although it seemed very boring and I didn’t really know what they were talking about.
The point is, there might be more to this. We know that Lorie Smith and her team couldn’t have contacted Stewart without some risk, but there’s no reason someone else – someone on the other side, perhaps – couldn’t have. Or maybe some internet sleuthing revealed who Stewart really was, some considerable time ago. “Who knew what, when?” – that would be another interesting question.
Stop Press: The Washington Post, in a somewhat sensible discussion of the topic, reports that Stewart is an LGBTQ activist who was working for the Clinton campaign when the bogus request was made to Lorie Smith in 2016. As noted, he has denied making the request.
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Good morning Britain!
I’ll just say:
Can I say HELLO! I’m in the library…
(Apologies to Trigger Happy TV trigger happy tv i’m in the library at DuckDuckGo )
Don’t you all usually do this good morning routine in Todays Update comments, rather than here in News Roundup?
The Update is strangely quiet.
I’ll be Anne Diamond, you can be Mike Morris.
Never heard of them. I like Neil Diamond though.
Ah, this is like the old days…
Anne Diamond in 1987.
Ezra Levant
@ezralevant
At the request of Trudeau, @GoFundMe
has just stolen $9,000,000 from the truckers. Rather than automatically refunding it to the donors, they say they’re going to give it to groups of their own choosing. What a windfall for Black Lives Matter, Greenpeace and Planned Parenthood!
https://twitter.com/ezralevant/status/1489744172202569731
Not sure he’s necessarily correct about the recipients – the release he attaches from GoFundMe says: “we will work with organisers to send all remaining funds to credible and established charities verified by GoFundMe“, which might mean approved recipients amongst the protesters, and refunds are available.
Nevertheless this is a gross betrayal of the donors and caving in to the regime’s lies about the protesters.
Find alternatives to GoFundMe.
It’s alright, nine million dollars stolen is a statistic as well…
They’ve moved to Give Send Go which is a Christian fundraising site that doesn’t pull those kinds of shenanigans:
https://www.givesendgo.com/FreedomConvoy2022
Apparently so many people are trying to donate they’re crashing the servers, so be patient.
There’s also this campaign which has less attention but is legit:
https://givesendgo.com/Warroomcanadanet
If you’re in Canada you can send an e-transfer directly to tbofconvoy2022@protonmail.com.
I realise with so many crazy faciomarxist stories from around the world to cover, our editors have to pick and choose.
In my opinion, the disruption of mass in Australia by the stasi, and the truckers protests in Ottawa and the developing one in America, deserve headlines in our Daily Sceptic.
Especially as the lying media censor them.
“They’ve moved to Give Send Go which is a Christian fundraising site that doesn’t pull those kinds of shenanigans:“
When you understand just how corrupt the leftist elites in government and in big business are, and how duped the masses are by their bs, the only solution is to look for principled groups outside the leftist consensus. The only ones you can trust to at least try to resist the dictats of power.
And I’m not even a Christian.
EL omits to mention that GFM’s press statement offers a link to a refund form. Refund requests have to be submitted within the next two weeks. No reason to hesitate, is there!
Grim.
Reminds me how the major bank cards and PayPal blocked funds raised for Assange and Wikileaks in 2010, throttling that campaign, which had shown signs of gaining significant traction.
And how the same forces ganged up to try to throttle Parler because it was committed to protecting freedom of speech for conservatives.
The donors should get every penny refunded if gofundme refuses to pay the donations to the intended recipients, including any admin fees they may have charged. Damn cheek!
Edit: it should be an automatic refund, not ‘on request’.
Mixed article in the Guardian where a group of Covid ‘experts’ including Neil Ferguson and Devi Sridhar say what they got wrong. Comrade Susan Michie saying she regrets not being more of a mask fanatic from the off
Peak Plandemic
Who can describe the most peak plandemic scenario? Here’s mine:
It’s a four way video call between Captain Tom from his garden, Kate Garraway’s husband Derek Draper, Joe Wicks and Elton John. And they’re discussing global citizenship and plant based meat in a video sponsored by Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Neil Ferguson and Devi Sridhar are “covid” experts? Only in the Guardian (I hope)!
What’s the McDonald’s plant thing like then? Any better than their other rubbish?
(Full disclosure – I sometimes buy from them!).
I nearly had McDonald’s sponsoring that video call, you read my mind! Haven’t tried their plant based simulated meatburger yet. And that’s as a life long vegetarian who also goes to the dark side on occasion.
I used to be, and still maintain that many people eat rather more meat and dairy than is good for them. One of my major points has been that if excesses of consumption relating to meat, dairy, clothes, and now such things as bio-fuel were reduced, and if we had good government (rather than the nonsense of the last two years), there would be no food shortages any time soon. Instead of which millions (and maybe hundreds of millions) of extra people go hungry in the “developing world” because a bug is going round. A bug that is nothing like the black death, or even the “Spanish” ‘flu.
It’s a revolting piece of pseudo mea culpas. They leaven their righteous correctness by simperingly admitting to being a teensy-weensy bit wrong on some minor points. It’s an unedifying stew of arrogance, ignorance and impenitence.
It’s exactly what you’d expect.
I also feel sorry that these poor little lambs were also misunderstood by the festering, doltish masses.
I don’t know how many people on here remember Q magazine used to have a ‘Who The Hell…?’ article every month where a celebrity was invited for interview and the article was opposite of what they thought and was actually used to humiliate them. If you were doing similar for Covid those three would be near the top of my list for interview.
“Jews are ‘white’ “???
Not in Zimbabwe they’re not. Honestly, there’s some right ignorant idiots out there.
Some of us remember the Falashas. Ethiopian Jews, black as your hat but as Jewish in religion as anyone could wish. They were welcomed to Israel when they fled persecution from people in their own country, who were also as black as your bat.
I watched a film about that. Something to do with a fake diving resort. Reasonably entertaining.
There are tiny enclaves of Jews in several places around the world, especially India and Africa.
Sammy Davis Jr. was Jewish by conversion.
“There’s no alternative to post-‘pandemic’ pain”.
If only the BBC had been saying that 24/7 from March 2020…
They weren’t, and Fishi Rishi wasn’t, but I was.
What a pity I wasn’t Chancellor at the time. Or anybody else with a couple of functioning neurons in their brain.
I just watched the famous ‘Question Time’ on BBC. It’s remarkable that Fiona Bruce, with all the resources of the BBC at her disposal, and with a world leading immunologist sitting there who either supported her or at the very least did not correct her (embarrassingly for Imperial College yet again) trots out the same blatantly incorrect figures that 90% of the people in Intensive Care with COVID are unvaccinated.
Could these experts and media people please just read the readily available public information such as the UKHSA vaccine report, and see that there were 4,807 unvaccinated people in emergency care and 10,448 double or triple vaccinated in the 4 weeks to Jan 23rd – around 32% not 90%.
With experts and media people like that no wonder the world has disappeared down a rabbit hole over the last couple of years.
And by the way excellent performance by the former philosophy student who managed so well to stand his own against some of the nonsense spouted by the panel !
Lies,damm lies, you know the rest!!
Robert Malone is sufficiently fed up to be in the mood to sue all the idiots who question his credentials, so people would be wise to be careful.
I think it would be fantastic if he did sue them all as at the moment you have sneering hordes who think they can say whatever nonsense suits their preconceived dimwit narrative, and then patronise anyone who tries to set the record straight, and as for the Twitter zombie crowd…Lord preserve us!
Interested to see the Vitamin D research. This benefit of Vitamin D has been known from the beginning of the epidemic, of course. And yet the government did not think to issue free pills – or even advice to take them.
This seems very similar to their Invermectin strategy, where they keep doing studies showing the benefit but never get around to recommending the medicine.
It is quite obvious that a decision was made early on that vaccines were to be the thing that saved us, and all other treatments were to be suppressed to give vaccines the best chance of appearing to be a ‘wonder drug’. People were killed in order to defend the political decision to spend a fortune on a novel untested technology that ended by not working.
I do wish the Sceptic would think about the ‘standing up for women’ strand in the updates. It was Feminism which pursued the ‘gender is a social construct’ narrative for years. I don’t agree with the trans changing rooms agenda – be they male or female – but the chivalrous approach of the Sceptic, women as brainless non-innovators, with nasty men foisting horrid things on them, is not the true story. You may enjoy the Karen Straughan videos – ‘Dismantling Feminism’ on YouTube. Question everything? Well, you seem very mainstream and reactionary on this topic.
WE’VE GOT OURSELVES SOME CONVOYS!!!
An auspicious day for freedom fighters all over the country
That reads; get the vax and still obey the rules designed for the unvaxxed.
The Daily Mail leading article on energy that is included in the roundup also includes a paragraph on prescription drug addiction as a result of lockdown. The last sentence is an excellent example of the ‘reverse ferreting’ currently in play. It reads ‘This silent epidemic of health misery is another stark illustration of the devastating collateral damage of lockdown’.
Quite a change!
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/shambolic-covid-pcr-testing-rules-153206332.html
Just seen this. It talks about the widespread variations in PCR thresholds across the country. It’s an Oxford University study. They’re a bit slow on the uptake though-we’ve been saying this here almost from the beginning of mass testing.
Latest on the fun and games here in The Western Lands.
Lockdownunder Update: There’s A Whole Lotta Goin’ Goin’ On.
Read this and weep
https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/leicester-mum-stopped-seeing-son-6605605
Fortunately it is now resolved but only after solicitors became involved.
Boycott Go Fund me. Truckers money being held back and may be diverted to other causes.
Why not go and pay them a visit?
https://corporateofficeheadquarters.org/gofundme/
You are becoming an embarrassment locked away in your Finnish bolthole.
All mouth and no trousers.
On the Left’s love of censorship.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/brandon-smith-leftists-use-mass-censorship-because-they-dont-have-guts-engage-fair-debate
Nice takedown of the stupid presentation that enlightened/misled Boris on climate change.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/boriss-climate-briefing-information-editing-or-wholly-misleading/
First signs of major trouble in ESGland and wokeland as Blackrock departs and gets headwinds.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/04/woke-capital-wont-save-the-planet-but-it-will-crash-the-economy/
“France relaxes requirements for travellers from UK”…what absolute sphericals; just check out the numbers on Worldmeters.com – for many days now, despite the French Consulate trying to suggest that the UK, by the governments own words quoted back at us originally, is facing a tidal wave of cases, the truth has been the exact opposite; “case” numbers are 2x/3x higher within France /Germany but still these corrupt EU members are using travel restrictions as a stick because of Brexit. If their logic was “true” they would be shutting their borders to all EU countries currently designated as “green” ( UK = amber, from a “special case” designation removed recently).
Has anyone wondered, if the “official” response from these countries is to “vaccinate” their entire population, why they allow travellers to present a certificate of CV recovery as an acceptable means of demonstrating CV status (rather than a CV Pass), but then still go on to request a pre departure LFT test within 48 hours out from 24 hours pre departure?
Is it just me or is that “position” as bombproof as a paper air raid shelter ? The logical extension of accepting a CV Recovery cert is that “vaccines” are …..not needed?
New mutant strain of HIV detected in the Netherlands. Is this:
(a) The cover story for covid jabs destroying people’s immune systems.
(b) Proof that sars-cov-2 is in fact a pneumonia with HIV added via GoF research.
(c) To grow the ‘most vulnerable’ pool and justify further injections to ‘protect’ them.
(d) Just another hoax to keep the population afraid of something.
(e) Freddie Mercury’s revenge.
This is typical of the media and people’s inability to pay attention for longer than 3 seconds. The more infectious strain was active between 1990 and 2010. It is very treatable and no more deadly. This is mentioned in the last 3rd of the article I read.
You sound like a (d) man.
prob a combination of all of a-d above.
The continuation of online lectures will be good for University finances, and as usual bad for the low income worker.
No students using lecture rooms, toilets, etc, will mean less cleaning staff required. No electricity or heating costs. Less stuff gets broken.
But also vending machines are used less and other loss of income on campus based shops. I guess if Costa has a franchise there, they still have to pay their rent, so less minimum wage or student jobs.
Just like sandwich/coffee/all kind of service shops in central London who do not benefit from office workers anymore.
When Jaeger closed down, my friend was surprised that a chain like that did not survive, and I said, one does not need a Jaeger suit to work from home.
Regarding the entire shambolic and totally contrived narrative over “green” energy and the supposed need for “net zero”, the following highly informative information comes from the customer web site of a leading UK energy supplier – Scottish Power. This is their explanation of the reasons for the situation now facing UK households.
Given gas can be used to generate electricity, the wholesale cost of electricity has also increased significantly.
Although this rise in wholesale costs is not UK specific, this country is especially vulnerable because it’s one of the biggest users of natural gas in Europe. That’s because most homes here rely on gas central heating. The UK also has less storage capacity than some other European countries.
So to summarise, there are three key reasons for the impending massive increase in UK domestic energy prices:
1) We are experiencing colder temperatures – so much for “Global Warming”
2) So called “renewable” energy sources
areunreliable,don’t F***ing work!3) The largest CO2 producer in the word is burning even more fossil fuel there by cancelling out any “carbon reduction” made by the UK, thus rendering the entire “green agenda” total bollox, even if you believed in it (which I do not).
These underlying factors are made even worse but the UK’s total failure to provide proper energy storage and supply infrastructure. Perhaps some of the billions given away to fake lockdown loan applicants or squandered on pointless, useless, Chinese PPE might have been better spent on our energy infrastructure.
Mr and Mrs NutNut of No 10 are utter morons for continuing to push their totally pointless and highly destructive green agenda. Unless, of course, there is a different underlying objective – like further controlling people’s lives and livelihoods. Perish the thought!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10476167/UK-set-bin-3-5million-Pfizer-vaccine-doses-despite-shelf-life-extended.html
The bin is the best place for the rubbish.
Police Bodyguard Of Trudeau Resigns Due To Utter Tyranny
https://www.bitchute.com/video/VslCOTL8j39g/