I wish to make a point: the plaintiff is not objecting to any particular message she was asked to write. She is suing her state for passing a law that forbids discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In other words, the right she is suing for is very specifically the right to discriminate, not the right to exercise freedom over the content of her artwork.
That's not "in other words"; that's saying something different. Your characterization of the issue in dispute does not match
Wikipedia's. "Smith claims it would have been against her Christian faith to make sites for non-heterosexual marriages." So what evidence do you have that she's suing for anything more than the right to exercise freedom over the content of her artwork?
Her clients are only theoretical;
Very sensible of her to seek an injunction in advance, rather than risk running afoul of a law that ends up being upheld. This is what test cases are for. What, should people only be allowed to know what the law is after they've already broken it? Should the government be allowed to get away with overstepping its bounds because of the chilling effect uncertainty has on getting anyone to challenge the law?
In the early Roman Republic the patricians got away with oppressing the plebeians because the law was oral tradition, and the patricians knew it better than the plebeians. The plebeians had to go on strike to force the patricians to agree to have written laws. From then on Roman laws were required to be written to be enforceable. Hundreds of years later, Caligula found that a little too confining for his taste in despotism and decreed that his laws were to be written at the top of some unscalable pillar. If you object to a court ruling on the rights of theoretical clients, you are playing Caligula.
she wants the right to forbid any business to gays altogether.
Show your work. What indication do you see that she's asking the court to authorize her to turn away, for example, a gay mother wanting to buy a website for her son's het marriage?
So all these hypotheticals should be likewise addressing discrimination against whole classes of people. Can a public business refuse to serve Germans on the sole basis of their apparent race?
I.e., you don't want the court to rule on the narrow question before it, so you're claiming it's the same as a broader question. But that you choose not to distinguish two questions doesn't constrain the rest of us to make believe that they're identical.
The only.question, and it is a worrying question, is whether they will keep the ruling customarily minimal in scope, or as is worryingly likely, take the opportunity to write an opinion so broad in scope as to open the door for the case that will take down Obergefell v Hodges on similar grounds of free speech obviating the right of states to define their own policies on discrimination.
"While the petition asked whether Employment Division v. Smith should be overruled, the Supreme Court limited the case to the question of whether Colorado's law violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment." The court wouldn't have done that if they had any intention of taking Obergefell down with it. Obergefell wasn't a First Amendment case.
I will never understand why any atheist conservative would want to live under a Christian theocracy. Are you guys genuinely too stupid to realize they'll be coming for you next, once the sexual deviants are all in jail? Fascist states cannot have a true end point or concrete goal, their political power is contingent on constantly identifying new targets for persecution, and they will do so until they finally go too far and are overthrown.
Oh for pete's sake, do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound? Theocrats are not in the business of putting up obstacles to government power over the people. Theocrats are in the business of forcing the people to express support for government policy.
Why are you even bothering to make arguments like that? Do you think you can talk us into forgetting who you are? We are not stupid enough not to realize that if the progressives win this one
you'll be coming for us next. It isn't the Christians who are punishing hate speech while defining more and more ideas as hateful. Progressives in countries without robust free speech protections have already criminalized racism; you are already arguing for weakening free speech protection in the U.S.; and
you personally have already trumped up false accusations of racism against me. So why in god's name would it be rational for an infidel like me to be more worried about Christian theocracy than progressive theocracy? Even if the Christians were trying as hard to erode the right to dissent as the progressives -- and they aren't -- Christianity is a dying faith, hemorrhaging believers faster than it can replace them. Progressivism is aggressive, on the march, growing by leaps and bounds, and full of no-fanatic-like-a-converted-fanatics.
When the progressive fascists persecute the homophobes into silence you'll be identifying new targets for persecution, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the writing on the wall, and know that sooner or later you're coming for the capitalists. So if I somehow manage to get through your revolution and subsequent police state without being shot, at least nobody will ever have to listen to me reciting "First they came for the homophobes and I said nothing because I was not a homophobe."
