From affirmative action to LBGTQ rights, it’s been a bad week for SCOTUS Dems

First, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson releases a blistering defense of racial discrimination in her dissent from the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision Thursday.

Then, on Friday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor puts out a largely incoherent defense of state-compelled speech in commercial life.

The illiberal wing of the Supreme Court is having a tough week.

As soon as the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Christian web designer named Lorie Smith, who had refused to create a gay wedding site, CNN blasted out this headline: “Supreme Court limits LGBTQ protections.”

CBS News followed by claiming the court ruled in “favor of a Colorado web designer who said her religious beliefs prevent her from taking on same-sex couples as clients.”

On and on it went, across the political media.

These are all lies.

And they are the same lies that rest at the heart of Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis.

“Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people,” the justice lamented.

The Supreme Court, she went on, declared “that a particular kind of business, though open to the public, has a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

This is incorrect.

Lorie Smith never turned away a customer because of their sexual preference or skin color or religious belief or anything else: She refused to create a message celebrating an event that conflicted with her sincerely held religious convictions.

She was practicing her First Amendment rights.

It’s an easy contention to prove.

If a straight person had tried to commission a same-sex wedding site, Smith would have turned them away, as well.

If a gay customer commissioned a website for their restaurant or hardware store or a haberdashery, Smith would have created it.

On the other hand, if the straight couple had asked her to create a pornographic website or a website declaring Zoroastrianism the one true faith, Smith would also have rejected those projects, because they too run afoul her evangelical Christian beliefs.

No one in this country, not an orthodox rabbi or a raging atheist, should be compelled to say things they don’t believe.

And if the right to express your thoughts — or, perhaps just as importantly, to refrain from expressing the thoughts of others — conflicts with existing public-accommodation laws, then public-accommodation laws should be overturned or fixed.

Think about it this way: A devout orthodox Christian — or Jew or Muslim — walks into a gay-owned bakery and demands the proprietor create a cake with the message, “Homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God.”

Should that baker be forced to make it?

Christians, after all, are also a protected group under anti-discrimination laws.

If the gay bakery refused, would it be discrimination or an issue of free expression?

What right does a stranger have to appropriate your skills and voice to express their opinions?

The answer is “none.”

To get around this problem, Sotomayor not only dispenses with the fundamental idea of neutrality under the law but invents new positive rights from the ether.

She claims in her dissent that the real problem here is the discrimination against “unfavored groups.”

First off, the gay couples, not Smith, are the favored group in this case.

The state of Colorado threatened Smith’s livelihood and tried to compel her to create a site.

The federal government backed the state of Colorado in these efforts.

The sitting president of the United States flies pride flags right next to American ones on the South Lawn of the White House while virtually every major corporation pays its respects on pride month.

If any group is disfavored in American life right now, it’s the orthodox Christian.

But, in the end, no one should be forced to speak whether they are favored or not.

Anti-discrimination laws were implemented to mitigate discrimination, not to put one group’s feelings above another group’s constitutional rights.

And, yet, this is exactly what Sotomayor and other American leftists demand happen.