NEWS

**We Can’t Be Legislated Away**

-Kevin Garcia

In the past week, SCOTUS has handed down alarming rulings that affect marginalized people especially. They have made major changes to Affirmative Action and the religious rights of business owners to discriminate. What can we do to push back?

The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States has done a number on the nerves of Americans this past year. Can you believe that Roe was overturned in June 2022? It’s only been a year, and in that time, the number of horrifying stories that have cropped up of women and pregnant people’s lives being threatened because they can’t access life-saving health care has been on the rise.

And I suppose it comes as no surprise that SCOTUS would disappoint us further by stripping affirmative action requirements from colleges and universities AND siding with a Christian web designer who lied to get her case brought before the high court.

According to NPR, the Colorado-based web designer, Lorie Smith, named a person identified as “Stewart” as the party with which she had a dispute, saying that Stewart requested Smith’s graphic design services to create a wedding website for his marriage to his gay partner.

Mind you, this case was filed in 2017, and at the time Lorie was not creating wedding websites, but she filed this preemptively so that in case any queer people ever requested services from her, she might be able to deny them based on her religious convictions and first amendment rights.

But what is wild is that the person named in the case, Stewart, had no idea he was even named in the case until he was contacted by The New Republic in connection to this case. He said, “I was incredibly surprised given the fact that I’ve been happily married to a woman for the last 15 years.”

To Recap:

Lorie Smith preemptively sued the state of Colorado just in case she might have queer customers in the future and would want to deny them services.

Lorie Smith wasn’t even offering the services she was asked for at the time.

And the person she named never filed a request for her services.