“The granddaughter of [anti-gay rights activist] Anita Bryant, Sarah Green, is a lesbian who plans to marry her girlfriend shortly… Green says her grandmother was not pleased…”
TEE UP ANOTHER FOR THE SUPREME COURT
As July came to a close, we got a victory out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, where two Clinton-nominated judges outvoted a Bush guy to rule in favor of the state of Colorado against a Christian web designer. The designer, Lorie Smith, wanted to start offering wedding websites. But first, it was important to Smith that she make sure the state’s anti discrimination law wouldn’t prevent her from refusing same-sex weddings. She sued, she lost, she appealed, and again she lost. But THE FIGHT’s legal analysts worry that this case may not be over for us.
Indeed, the annoying Alliance Defending Freedom has promised to appeal this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, so we will soon be spending our days checking the petition conferences to see if any action has been taken in this regard.
And speaking of petitions, since we last communed in these pages, the High Court took the unusual but promising step of rejecting the case of the florist in Washington state. You remember Barronelle Stutzman, the woman whose name I have to check with each and every reference even though I must have typed it a hundred times. (Baronelle? Baronnell? Barronnelle? Stutzmann? Here we go again. It’s two “r”s, one “n,” two “l”s, one “n.” Maybe this will be the last time.)
Stutzman, the Christian owner of Arlene’s Flowers, refused to help two gay men with their wedding flowers, in violation of Washington law. After losing before the state supreme court, her case languished at the High Court until after the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling in late 2016. Then, the justices sent it back to Washington, where the courts once again ruled against Stutzman. Another petition was filed before the High Court and again, sat around forever.
Just last month, however, the Court turned thumbs down and denied review. Three justices, Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas, all said they would have taken the case, which means that the trio was unable to convince one more justice to join them. It only takes four justices to agree to head an appeal, so we know that for whatever reason, neither Barrett, Kavanaugh nor Roberts were willing to weigh the pros and cons of giving random Christians a free pass to ignore GLBT civil rights laws that protect the public square.
The question ahead will be whether or not these justices think an exception should be made for a case like this one out of Colorado, that combines Free Speech and religious expression. When, if ever, can the government basically force a religious actor to generate speech that (allegedly) violates his or her faith? The law might force you to sell flowers to a gay groom, but do you have to arrange their celebratory website?
I hope the answer’s yes, because you have another choice, which is to avoid the website business all together. After all, if you’re a chef and your religion dictates that you can only serve white people, you don’t open a restaurant.
At least I can spell Lorie Smith.
ON THE SMALL SCREEN
Mel and I have been binging dark European detective shows for over a year now, and frankly, we’re kind of over it for now. That said, we loved the satirical show “Fallet,” which makes fun of every noir police procedural you’ve ever seen, beginning with the trigger-happy Stockholm detective assigned to a low priority case in her back-water hometown as punishment, and paired with an inept British cop from “St. Ives.” Check it out on Netflix.
At any rate, we recently fell back on back episodes of “The Closer,” like comfort food, and watched so many of them that I feel as if I now live in LA instead of Austin. There aren’t any shows based here, except for a firefighter show with Rob Lowe that got everything wrong. The scene where Rob Lowe moves to Austin from New York features long shots of the Texas desert hundreds of miles west of us instead of the swampy bayous and large metropolis just to our east. And let’s not even mention the cowboys and ranches that the producers swapped in for our vineyards and hill country. I’m assuming “The Closer” wasn’t filmed in Toronto or something.
THERE OUGHT NOT BE A LAW
The state of Massachusetts has already cleaned up a lot of its archaic legal language, but I guess some outliers still remain, including a law against unspecified lewd and lascivious behavior that could send a lot of us to the clink. Rep. Jay Livingstone has isolated ten of the most absurd provisions that remain in the code book including, wwlp.com reports, “a requirement that all public schools feature a daily Bible reading, criminalization of ‘tramps, vagabonds and vagrants,’… language declaring the Communist Party ‘a subversive organization… and a section of state law punishing anyone who ‘blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world.’”
“Contumelious” is an adjective meaning “insolently abusive and humiliating” says Merriam Webster. It’s pronounced “contuMEElius.” I think we need to know this word. Oh what? You knew it already? Well, aren’t you something special (she wrote contumeliously).
Interested in other weird laws? You can’t catch fish with your hands in Indiana, you can’t buy a cocktail in Nebraska that mixes liquor and beer, you can’t wade in fountains in Wichita, and you can’t fall asleep in a cheese store in Illinois. These are part of a fact checked list, because apparently many of these weird law lists are not accurate. Oh, and it’s against the law to drink alcohol on the beach in Hawaii. Really?
WEDDING BELLS FOR ANITA BRYANT
Ooops. Looks like my time and space are running low and I’ve delivered very little in terms of hard GLBT news. But before I go, you should know that the granddaughter of Anita Bryant, Sarah Green, is a lesbian who plans to marry her girlfriend shortly. Years ago, when the erstwhile antigay Orange Juice huckster was helping to celebrate Sarah’s 21st birthday, Bryant coyly predicted that a husband might be in Sarah’s future. “I just snapped,” Green recalled. “I hope that [a husband] doesn’t come along because I’m gay, and I don’t want a man to come along,” Green told her unhappy grandmother, who now lives in Oklahoma.
Both Mel and I were sure Anita Bryant was dead, by the way. But I guess she’s in her early 80s and still going strong. Green says her grandmother was not pleased to learn of her engagement, but might be mad if she isn’t invited to the wedding, ergo, she plans to ask Bryant if she would like an invitation. That could be interesting!
