By Federale
06/15/2012
And fails miserably. National Review Online is shocked, shocked they say, to find that civil rights laws, specifically public accommodation laws are violating the First Amendment. However NRO thinks that the First Amendment covers only religious freedom, not freedom of association and speech.
NRO by Ian Tuttle June 14, 2012
New Mexico Assaults Religious Liberty
When 43 Catholic dioceses, schools, and institutions filed suit against the Obama administration to block the HHS mandate, they reiterated for all Americans the importance of preserving “our first, most cherished liberty”: religious liberty, as guaranteed in the First Amendment. But while national attention lingers on that specific clash, fresh assaults on religious liberty carry on elsewhere.
The latest battleground is New Mexico. In 2008, the New Mexico Human Rights Commission found Elane Photography, an Albuquerque photography studio co-owned by Elaine Huguenin and her husband, Jonathan, guilty of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation for refusing to photograph Vanessa Willock’s same-sex “commitment ceremony.” The court ordered the business to pay $6,600 in attorney’s fees …
But isn’t a photography studio’s product different in kind from the products of, say, a burger joint or a shoe store? Neither the commission nor the court believed so. While the studio “does exercise some degree of control over the photographs it is hired to take,” the court wrote, “this control does not transform the photographs into a message from Elane Photography.” The court labeled the business, instead, “a mere conduit for another’s expression,” thereby denying it any free-speech protections available under the First Amendment.
Well, no, a photography studio is as much a public accommodation regulated by the State as a burger joint or a shoe store. And NRO’s current error, since they initially opposed such civil rights legislation dealing with public accommodation, is that their first position was correct.
And the inevitable logic of public accommodation would end up with religious beliefs violated by the Federal and State governments. NRO thought that by sacrificing access to lunch counters and freedom of association would leave Americans with the remainder of the First Amendment. They seemed to think that there was a hierarchy of freedoms in the First Amendment. That some freedoms protected in the First Amendment were more important than others. They have just learned otherwise.
Well, the neo-cons at NRO are finding that that by abandoning Segregationists they were not accommodated, so to speak, by the Marxist, who continued their centuries old war on religion as well as other freedoms. Who'd a thunk? One cannot accommodate Marxists. They are like the original bad Terminator, they never stop. They will keep coming until they kill us. Sacrificing Segregationists did not save freedom, it only delayed it for a few days. Religious freedom was always one of their targets.
It is time NRO realized that. There is no accommodation with the Marxists. There is no sacrifice that will satiate them. They will keep coming until they kill you and your progeny. Lesson learned.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.