2023-07-02 05:01:00
In the United States, it is constitutional for a person to refuse to provide their creative services to a gay couple if they believe so because of their religious beliefs. On the other hand, it is illegal to take racial differences into account when admitting students to universities in order to favor the most disadvantaged groups. Nor is the government’s plan to help those who have gotten into debt to be able to study legal. All this according to a string of decisions made by the Supreme Court of the North American country in the last week. A new series of rulings that accentuate the conservative trend of the highest court.
Do it anti-LGBTQ+
The United States Supreme Court decided to close Pride Month by giving the anti-LGBTQ+ sector a legal victory. In a ruling made public Friday, he held that the US Constitution prohibits the state of Colorado from forcing a designer to create websites with messages she disagrees with. Specifically, those that have to do with equal marriage. The decision bears the signature of six of the court’s nine judges, all appointed by Republican Party governments. The remaining three justices, appointed during Democratic administrations, voted against it.
For the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the court’s decision “opens the door for any business that claims to provide tailored services to discriminate against historically marginalized groups.” “The decision is fundamentally wrong,” the organization said in a statement.
The path of the case from the Colorado courts to the offices of the Supreme Court is curious to say the least, as it was told this week by the progressive magazine The New Republic: includes a hypothetical case and the consultation of a supposedly non-existent homosexual couple.
In the case, a Colorado woman argued that she wanted to expand her design business to serve couples who wanted a wedding website. She was concerned, however, about a state law that prohibits discrimination based on race, creed, disability or sexual orientation. She considered that he would force her to design pages about “marriages that she does not support,” according to the Court’s ruling. So, in 2016, she applied for a waiver.
According to the documents reviewed by The New Republic, in that first order there is no inclusion of any actual query that went against the designer’s religious beliefs. It is just a hypothetical situation. The woman’s lawyers would recently include a specific query almost six months after the case began: an email from a person who, according to the investigation published by the magazine this week, turns out to be a married heterosexual man who says he knows nothing about the issue.
It is not the first time that the conservative movement uses the constitution to justify discrimination against LGBTQ+ communities. In 2018, the Supreme Court also evaluated a Colorado case, that of a pastry chef accused of discriminating against a gay couple for refusing to sell them a cake for their wedding. At that time, another composition of the court considered that the state authorities had not been fair in their treatment of the case and ruled in favor of the pastry chef, but avoided defining whether a person could refuse to provide a service if it went against their beliefs. The current Court, with the conservative majority that Donald Trump secured during his tenure, said yes.
affirmative action
During the week, the court also ruled against what is known as “affirmative action”: a strategy by American universities to select their future students taking into account the racial information of each one. According to the Court, the admission programs of Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the two institutions named in the case, violate the Equal Protection Clause included in the constitution.
Following the ruling, Harvard said it would abide by the court’s decision, noting that it can still consider race during admissions processes if applicants include it in discussions about how it affected their lives. For its part, the University of North Carolina said that while this was not the outcome it hoped for, it will respect the decision.
student debt
In the last week of its session, the Court did not only focus on who can enter the universities. It also ruled on what happens after you graduate and have a debt of several tens of thousands of dollars as a result of the loans requested to pay for your studies. In a decision that directly impacted the White House’s plans to show a progressive agenda, the court’s conservative majority held that the Department of Education does not have the power to establish a program that forgives student debt and cancels some 430 billion dollars. Dollars.
For Joe Biden, Republican officials “just couldn’t stomach the idea of bringing relief to working-class and middle-class Americans.” “The hypocrisy is impressive,” he said Friday when the ruling was announced. “They had no problem with the billions [de dólares] of business loans in the pandemic, including those that went to their own businesses. But when it came to giving relief to millions of hard working Americans, they did everything to stop it,” he added Saturday on Twitter.
advance from the right
The advancement of the right-wing agenda at the close of this session of the Court is reminiscent of what also happened in 2022, when the court annulled the ruling that guaranteed access to abortion throughout the North American country and voted against the control of weapons.
For Republicans, there was cause for celebration: Trump highlighted the new rulings and celebrated them as victories of his own. After all, it was his presidency that introduced three of the judges from the conservative bloc. His main competitor in the Republican internal, the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, took the opportunity to promise that, if he reaches the White House, he will ensure that the Court turns even more to the right.
For the Democratic Party, the decisions were shocking, especially for the more progressive wing. “It is deeply troubling that a group of Republicans have seized control of the highest court in the land and systematically roll back our freedoms,” said Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow. “We cannot sit by while these judges carry out the orders of right-wing organizations. Expand the Court, ”asked one of her colleagues, Senator Tina Smith, by twitter.
He is not the only Democratic voice asking Biden to expand the number of members of the court while the party controls the White House. Those who claim this point against the handling by the Republican Party of the two appointments that allowed the balance to tip to the conservative side: it blocked an appointment during the presidency of Barack Obama with the excuse that there was little time left for the 2016 elections, but he had no problem with allowing Trump to fill one of the chairs in 2020 weeks before that year’s election.
Biden does not agree with this method. “I think that if we start the process of expanding the Court, we are going to politicize it, perhaps forever, in a way that is not healthy,” he said Thursday in an interview with MSNBC. However, he also maintained that the current composition “has done more to undo basic rights” than any other in recent history. “It’s not a normal court,” she said.
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