Supreme Court Balances Anti-Discrimination Laws with Expressive Freedom Protections

The Supreme Court rules in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis that the First Amendment bars Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees.
The majority ruling was based on First Amendment free speech grounds.
The progressive media, LGBTQ+ activist fundraising lobbies, and Democratic party politicos claim that the ruling is a frontal attack on LGBTQ+ rights and allows businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ+ clients. But the ruling does not permit businesses to refuse LGBTQ+ customers overall; it’s clearly targeted at allowing providers to refuse requests for services that involve the creation of explicit communications that violate the provider’s beliefs.
It is often necessary to balance conflicting rights. LGBTQ+ activists and Democratic party officials want to use the state to force small business owners to engage in expressive activity that violates their religious or otherwise deeply held beliefs. The court rightly told them to desist.
(Edited to clarify that the decision was based on freedom of speech, not religious freedom, grounds.)

Added:

Intersectional Homophobia

You hear this more and more, and not just on campuses, which largely birthed woke intersectional dogma, but in mainstream LGBTQ movement groups, such as GLAAD (discussed here) and HRC. Cis, gay, white men, increasingly, aren’t welcomed, or are expected to receive and accept abuse as penance for their privilege if they are employed or otherwise seek to be involved. Yet they continue to fund these same groups, as they always have.

From LGBAlliance USA, A Rainbow by Any Other Name: In Defense of “The Homosexual”:

One gay man’s story about how campus LGBTQ organizations have become places filled with regressive homophobia that will not allow advocacy based on same-sex orientation.

Taking a Stand

James Kirchick writes:

If the public face of the ACLU was Ira Glasser during the latter part of the previous century, today that honor can be claimed by a staff attorney named Chase Strangio … the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice. Like many activists consumed by this issue, he is uncompromising in demanding strict adherence to a set of highly contestable orthodoxies, and merciless toward anyone who dares question them. Two women who have—J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, and Abigail Shrier, author of a book about the role of “peer contagion” in the rising rate of teenage girls declaring themselves transgender—are “closely aligned with white supremacists in power,” Strangio declared on Twitter, offering not a shred of evidence for this claim. “Stopping the circulation of [Shrier’s] book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he wrote, a rather bizarre position for an ACLU employee to endorse. …

Strangio is of course perfectly entitled to his views about the fairness of allowing natal males to compete against natal females in high school sports, and to advocate for an “information climate” suppressing books he doesn’t like. What’s puzzling is why someone with such pro-censorship inclinations would want to work, of all places, at the American Civil Liberties Union. … Puzzling, that is, until you realize that—like so many other institutions whose worthy missions we naively assumed to be inviolable—the ACLU is no longer itself.

Plus this:

And when other constitutional rights have come into conflict with a First Amendment freedom even more unpopular with progressives than speech—that of religion—the ACLU has made it all but official policy to consider claims of religious conscience as smokescreens for discrimination, arguing that an evangelical Christian baker must make cakes for same-sex weddings against his will (a violation of both expressive and religious freedom), and that Catholic hospitals must perform abortions.

Purposely misleading:

The downward spirals goes on and on … and on