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

#TheRightHatesDiversity
#GOPTheRealSnowflakes
#PartisanSupremeCourt
#RightWingSnowflakes
#Freedom4MeNotThee
#ChristianNationalism

"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."

Musk may be smart about making money, but not about too many other things like journalism, the constitution, politics, etc. He thinks he's the smartest person, he's not!! Too many yes men telling him he is and never disagreeing with him...

But then, what has the GOP's panties all in a bunch over Hunter Biden and his laptop?

There’s Nothing Stranger Than the Right’s Fixation With Hunter Biden | The New Republic https://newrepublic.com/article/169295/gop-hunter-biden-obsession-media

#GOPTheRealSnowflakes
#MusksBlunders

"What exactly is at the root of the right’s Hunter Biden obsession?
...
The briefest recap is this. On Friday, Elon Musk tweeted that he was going to reveal how Twitter supposedly covered up the Hunter Biden scandal in October 2020. Matt Taibbi (“the Tulsi Gabbard of Substack,” as The Bulwark’s Tim Miller icily dubbed him) posted some of the emails found on Hunter’s hard drive. Some showed the Biden campaign asking Twitter to refrain from posting certain material.

That’s basically it. In some quarters of the right, this is the biggest scandal in the history of the republic, because it allegedly proves that Biden used his governmental power (a neat trick for someone who, at the time, controlled no part of the government) to set fire to the Constitution. “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s first amendment, what is,” Musk tweeted.

What this actually proves is two things about Musk. First, he is a constitutional illiterate. The First Amendment enjoins only the government from suppressing speech. During his 2020 campaign, Biden was a private citizen, so he had no means by which to violate the First Amendment at all. It also proves that Musk knows nothing about how politics and journalism work.
...
Now: Here’s the psychotic part. As Miller put it: “The offending material that Taibbi revealed was removed by Twitter at the Biden campaign’s request turns out to have been a bunch of links to Hunter Biden in the buff.” And these photos revealed to the world that Hunter has … well, you know … let’s just say that he has been blessed by nature. The New York Post reported over the summer on its actual size. You can go look that up if you wish.

...And isn’t it particularly acute among conservative men, all full of that macho swagger? Isn’t that swagger a form of compensation, like that bright orange Dodge Charger the 61-year-old balding man suddenly decides he can’t live without? And isn’t Donald Trump, who still smarts 30 years later from being dubbed “short-fingered” by Spy, the most insecure of all men along these lines? You surely don’t forget the time he actually made his penis a campaign issue in 2016. It’s not the kind of thing you can unremember.

...But I am saying, absolutely, that there is something strange and psychological about the Hunter obsession.

Perhaps it comes down to simply this: It’s all they have, and that makes them insane. Joe Biden has been in public life for half a century and has never been attached to a whiff of financial scandal. It makes the right, especially the Trumpy right, nuts. In Trumpworld, everyone is corrupt; that’s a given. Only schmucks aren’t out to cut corners and game the system. The only difference is between those smart enough to get away with it and those dumb enough to get caught.
...
That is the Joe Biden we know—a decent and compassionate man, the man who helped that one boy overcome his stutter and who comforts those in mourning with such obvious sincerity. He’s the mirror image of the man the right has made its recent leader and hero, a man who would discard a drug-addicted child as a weakling in about five seconds and would humiliate a stutterer who had the misfortune to stumble into his dark presence.

And it is on these rocks that I suspect the GOP’s Hunter obsession may crash, in the end. Lots of families don’t have international wheeler-dealers trying to trade on their dad’s name, that much is true. But lots of families have black sheep, and millions of them are familiar with what it’s like to have loved ones who struggle with addiction. More Americans will look upon Hunter Biden with some measure of pity than Republicans think (aside from wondering why the hell they’re carrying on about him instead of trying to do something for middle-class families).

The Hunter crusade is thus driven not only by pursuit of scandal to hang around his father’s neck; it is rooted in the right’s antique and cruel values system, which most Americans no longer share. Should Republicans catch Hunter in some genuinely corrupt or illegal arrangement, so be it! Let him pay his debt to society. If they don’t, they will be left wondering why America doesn’t share their seething hatred of a man whom the Jesus they claim to worship would have counseled us to regard with compassion. These would-be Javerts with their weird psychosexual obsessions are the ones who are truly out of touch."