Free Speech saves the day again. This time in Minnesota. Where Christian Videographers did not want to be forced to record same-sex weddings. Minnesota Human Rights laws would have required them to record any wedding or none at all.
Related: Hate Speech Doesn’t Exist
Minnesota would also require them to produce videos that depicted “same- and opposite-sex weddings in an equally ‘positive’ light.” This raised the possibility that a gay couple who didn’t like the subjective quality of a video the Larsens produced for them could seek state sanctions based on alleged sexual-orientation discrimination. …
To put it plainly, Minnesota was attempting to engage in one of the most intrusive state actions on the First Amendment. It was attempting to compel the Larsens to deliver a message they opposed.
Note to the Human Rights and diversity geeks in the Granite State. According to the Judge who wrote the majority opinion, “Even antidiscrimination laws, as critically important as they are,” … “must yield to the Constitution.”
Regulating speech because it is discriminatory or offensive is not a compelling state interest, however hurtful the speech may be. It is a “bedrock principle . . . that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
As a point of order, no videographer, butcher, baker, or candlestick maker should be forced by the state to do anything for anyone. Ever. But the use of diversity and human rights committees to force-feed free speech infringements into the collective conscious is ideological supremacy. It’s the idea that political elites and whatever mob are pulling their stings have that authority to decide what people can say or believe. Even how they should think.
The founders were acutely aware of the consequences, having come to from a time where that was the order of the say. There was no true free will, free thought, or free speech.
Today’s “monarchs” are using these ideas to impose codes on speech, conduct, behavior, even belief, not to spare anyone hurt feelings, but to create legal precedents to control people to accumulate power.
So far, the courts have been unwilling to allow it. But that protection only lasts for as long as the courts feel no allegiance to the same progressive masters.
| NRO