Texas lawsuit explained: How a man is suing his ex-wife’s friends for murder over her abortion. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/texas-lawsuit-suing-friends-explained.html

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"On the surface, this argument makes some sense. Upon closer scrutiny, it falls apart. There is a hole at its center: Texas law expressly states that an individual does not commit a criminal act when she terminates her own pregnancy. The state’s abortion bans, homicide statute, and assault statute all declare that self-managed abortion is not a criminal act and cannot be punished as one. So even if Doe’s fetus “died,” for purposes of Texas law, its death was not “wrongful,” so no one can be held liable for abetting it. As Joanna Grossman, a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, told Slate: “If there’s no wrongful death, then there’s no wrongful death liability.”

“Jonathan Mitchell knows he’s not going to win this case,” Grossman said. “It’s all smoke and mirrors.” (It is a perverse irony of the litigation that the defendants earnestly tried to give Doe accurate legal advice while Mitchell is deliberately misusing the law to terrorize them for doing just that.) What, then, is the purpose of this lawsuit? It seems the suit has several extralegal goals, all of which are rooted in a brazenly misogynistic desire to let men manipulate the legal system to control women’s bodies and keep them trapped in dangerous relationships.

It seems the suit has several extralegal goals, all of which are rooted in a brazenly misogynistic desire to let men manipulate the legal system to control women’s bodies and keep them trapped in dangerous relationships.
One aim is certainly to set a precedent that helps isolate pregnant people through terror and surveillance. The fear of winding up ensnared in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that ruins the lives of one’s closest friends is certainly a good motivator. Mitchell, Cain, and the Thomas More lawyers want all pregnant Texans to understand that they are being watched —in this case, by a vindictive ex—and will be reported to the state if they seek to terminate a pregnancy. They are never safe from men who will wield litigation as a tool to punish women who attempt to escape a manipulative partner. This is spousal abuse via lawsuit. Indeed, in 1992, the Supreme Court refused to allow for mandatory spousal notification precisely because it could be used as a cudgel to abuse and torment women. SCOTUS reversed that decision when it overruled Roe, though, and this complaint is the inevitable result of that reversal: It attempts to assert that every husband should now be granted the right to terrorize pregnant people and bankrupt their friends.
...
That, of course, was the goal of S.B. 8, which empowered random strangers to sue anyone who dared to “aid or abet” a clinical abortion. Now Mitchell is broadening his dragnet to include medication abortions, placing a bounty on the head of anyone who helps a pregnant person obtain these pills.
...
Second, the suit serves as a window. It’s crucial to see where the anti-abortion movement is heading next now that Roe v. Wade has fallen. Their quest to end abortion has been undercut by the ubiquity of abortion pills, which are very easy to procure online and to ship across state and international lines. While some lawyers fight to ban these drugs nationwide, others, like Mitchell, seek to ruin the lives of anyone who facilitates their delivery to a pregnant person or offers advice on how to procure them. In other words, S.B. 8 was only the beginning of the anti-abortion vigilantism. The lawyers hellbent on obliterating all access to reproductive care will not rest until anyone who so much as texts a friend about abortion must fear that they could be defamed as a murderer."

They get triggered/melt in the face of any diversity--gay, black, transsexual, "woke," not Christian. It really bothers them. Who are the real snowflakes here?

They want the freedom to impose their religion on everyone else. Freedom of religion for me, but not thee!

Opinion | US Supreme Court Wants to Make America More Bigoted Again | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/07/us-supreme-court-wants-make-america-more-bigoted-again

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"Bigots are switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.

THOM HARTMANN

December 7, 2022
The Supreme Court appears hell-bent on making America bigoted again. Step-by-step, they're undoing every bit of progressive legislation from the past 80 years that they can find.

Now they're going after the right of gays and lesbians who want to get married to shop for a website, or pretty much anything else that requires "creative" effort.

There was a time in America when any retail business could, as the old sign said, "reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason." Often such proclamations were just slightly more subtle than the "No Negros," "No Jews," or "No Irishmen" signs they replaced, although they still pepper retail establishments across the nation.

And it's true that if you run a "public accommodation," you're welcome to toss out drunk, belligerent, naked, high, or otherwise offensive customers. Bars and airlines—clearly public accommodations—do it daily.

But, particularly since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there are boundaries around who you can and can't refuse to serve. Under federal law, you can toss out somebody because they're wearing a tee-shirt that has offensive language printed on it, but you can't toss out somebody because they're Black or wearing a yarmulke.

Title II of the Civil Rights Act specifically says a company doing business with the public can't discriminate based on "race, color, religion, or national origin."

And in 23 states plus Washington, DC you can't refuse service to somebody because of sexual orientation. (The Equality Act, which would put that protection into federal law, has passed the House twice, last year and in 2019, but died both times in the Senate because of Republican filibusters.)

Now the Supreme Court has those state laws protecting gay people in its cross-hairs in the 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis case they heard argued yesterday: specifically Colorado's law that bans discrimination based on "disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry."

In a twist, the Republicans on the Court chose not to hear Lorie Smith's original argument that, through her company 303 Creative, she shouldn't have to make a website for a gay wedding because it offends her "deeply held Christian faith."

(Although no gay couple has ever asked her to make a wedding website—in fact, no couple of any sort has ever asked her to make any website for their wedding—she's apparently worried that it may happen and so, with big bucks from rightwingers behind her, took her case to the Supreme Court.)

Instead, Republicans on the Court used their majority status to decide, from among her various arguments, to shift the frame toward "creative expression," choosing to decide:
...
Tearing down Colorado's law in the name of "creative expression" is the new strategy for "Christian" fundamentalists to attack public accommodation laws; this is in large part a repeat of their failed effort to strike down Colorado's public accommodation law in the infamous 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop gay wedding cake case.
...
Bigots using religion as their excuse have chafed at these laws ever since Bobby Kennedy used them to forcefully integrate lunch counters in the South and his federal prosecutors used them to end racial and religious discrimination in hotels, theaters, and bars.

Now they're switching to "creative expression" instead of religion as the club they'll use to beat down public accommodation laws.
...
Is the guy painting my gay friend's house "creative" because he's helping choose colors and paint the house? How about a barber? Or the chef who owns his own restaurant or lunch counter? A bartender who custom-mixes cocktails?

If this decision is handed down in Smith's favor and knocks down the Colorado law (and 22 other states'), expect a whole spectrum of businesses run by bigots and religious freaks to begin discriminating against people not protected by the federal Civil Rights Act, with queer people at the top of that list.

If SCOTUS goes the whole distance and guts the Civil Rights Act—like Republicans on the Court did with the Voting Rights Act in 2013—discrimination against women, Blacks, Jews, Muslims, and the disabled will again become part of the American landscape."

They don't want freedom of religion, they want their religion privileged!

Opinion | The Supreme Court keeps coddling the religious right. It shouldn’t. - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/07/supreme-court-lgbtq-discrimination-first-amendment-colorado-web-designer/
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"In its ongoing project to widen the privileges accorded to religious people — especially conservative Christians — the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is poised to undermine a critical distinction: the one between rules we obey in our personal lives and how that changes when we enter the commercial marketplace.

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That was the implication of the oral argument at the Supreme Court on Monday in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. This case is about whether a website designer in Colorado can refuse to make sites for same-sex weddings, despite a state law that protects people from discrimination in public accommodations (i.e., businesses open to the public) by virtue of race, religion, sex, disability and sexual orientation, among other things.

The case was brought by designer Lorie Smith, who arrived at the court bearing a purely hypothetical injury at Colorado’s hands. While Smith has not actually been penalized by the state for violating that law, she worries that one day she might be, if she decides to design websites for weddings (she hasn’t yet), and if a same-sex couple asks her to design one for them, and if she turns them away, and if they report her to the state, and if the state takes action against her.

Given that, it might sound odd that Smith is the face of this case. But as law professor Hila Keren observes, it was precisely because Smith has not actually turned away any potential gay clients that she was chosen by the religious right’s legal apparatus — represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the lavishly funded organization representing Smith — to be the plaintiff in this suit. She can be the sole actor in the story, a living person whose (even hypothetical) injury can garner sympathy from the justices, even as there is no victim of her discrimination with a name and a face.

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As always, the conservatives on the court have seemingly bottomless sympathy for Christian plaintiffs who say their right to the fullest expression of their religious beliefs is being hindered. Yet we used to have both a common and legal understanding that the commercial space is one where you may have to adjust your personal preferences and abide by rules in ways you don’t elsewhere.
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For the conservatives on the court, however, religion — in particular, conservative versions of Christianity — changes everything, even how we should think about commerce. They’ve been steadily carving out more and more spaces where religious claims under the First Amendment trump every other right or law, whether it has to do with health-insurance regulations or Christian prayer in schools.

When it comes to the commercial right to discriminate, we had this debate in the middle of the 20th century. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in oral arguments, “opposition to interracial marriages and to integration, in many instances, was on religious grounds.” But we as a society, in both law and practice, rejected those who said discrimination should be allowed if it’s based on a religious belief. We said you have a right to refuse to have friends of a different race, or write racist screeds and hand them out on a street corner. But if you open a restaurant or a bookstore or a car dealership, you have to serve everyone.

The fact that website design is expressive in some ways shouldn’t change that. Colorado isn’t telling Lorie Smith how to do her job, just that she can’t turn away customers based solely on their membership in one of the classes the state’s law protects. And the truth is, there would likely be little or no difference between a website she created for a straight couple and one she created for a gay couple. She just wants to effectively put a “No Gays Allowed” sign on her business.

If your state prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ people, you have to obey that law when you do business, even if you don’t like it. Or, at least you will until the court hands down its likely decision in this case."