The Supreme Court quietly handed some very bad news to anti-LGBT businesses
by Ian Millhiser at Think Progress
https://thinkprogress.org/the-supreme-court-quietly-handed-some-very-bad-news-to-anti-lgbt-businesses-af1e5d7e5287
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To be sure, in order to actually collect that money, a store would likely have to put “$10” on its menus or have its employees tell customers that price. Those written or oral communications would be speech, and the law — by determining the amount charged — would indirectly dictate the content of that speech. But the law’s effect on speech would be only incidental to its primary effect on conduct, and “it has never been deemed an abridgment of freedom of speech or press to make a course of conduct illegal merely because the conduct was in part initiated, evidenced, or carried out by means of language, either spoken, written, or printed.”
This explanation by Roberts — that a law does not raise First Amendment problems simply because it has some incidental impact on people’s speech — may seem obvious, but it hasn’t been obvious at all to conservative litigators seeking to transform the First Amendment into a weapon against business regulation.
The most comic example of this genre of cases was a suit filed by conservative superlawyer Paul Clement, which claimed that Seattle’s minimum wage law violates the First Amendment because it forces employers to spend money on wages that they could otherwise spend on advertising. That suit did not fare well.
Anti-LGBT discrimination
Two other suits seeking to weaponize the First Amendment, however, are more likely to be taken seriously by the Supreme Court. The first, as ACLU LGBT rights attorney Joshua Block notes on Twitter, are a series of lawsuits claiming that the First Amendment gives anti-LGBT business owners a right to discriminate.
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