Opinion | The Supreme Court’s Ruling on Refusing Gay Business
To the Editor:
Re “Net Designer Wins Proper to Flip Away Homosexual Individuals” (entrance web page, July 1):
Given the Supreme Court docket’s observe document all through the previous 12 months — together with, most notably, the gutting of affirmative motion and federal abortion protections — I shouldn’t have been shocked when, alongside ideological strains, it dominated in favor of an internet designer who would refuse a same-sex couple in search of her providers. But, I used to be.
However greater than that, I used to be afraid for the futures of L.G.B.T.Q.+ people, whose rights are seemingly undermined with every passing day. I concern that the day will arrive when outward discrimination and oppression develop into permissible, as long as they’re offered underneath the guise of non secular freedom or free speech. The day when indicators studying “Gays not served right here” develop into a actuality.
I might love greater than the rest to idiot myself into believing that the US has realized its beliefs of justice and equality for all. But, the opposite is painfully evident when one of many biggest setbacks the L.G.B.T.Q.+ neighborhood has encountered just lately happens throughout Delight Month.
Ravin Bhatia
Brookline, Mass.
To the Editor:
I’m a 76-year-old lesbian. Right here’s the factor: My accomplice and I and our supportive household would by no means purchase a cake or a web site from any enterprise that discriminates. So this isn’t about that.
It’s in regards to the Supreme Court docket saying there’s something about our love of 34 years that isn’t equal to your love. Who we’re shouldn’t be equal. And what that is actually about is that the constitutional separation of church and state is not revered by the best court docket of our land.
Nancy Flaxman
Novato, Calif.
To the Editor:
I’m confused. Aren’t Christians presupposed to behave as Jesus Christ did? Jesus accepted and liked everybody — prostitutes, sinners, and so forth. The perspective of denying service to L.G.B.T.Q. individuals who search assist from a enterprise open to the general public strikes me as un-Christian.
No surprise so many individuals are selecting to not affiliate with church buildings, and a big share are labeled “nones” — no non secular affiliation.
I urge all Christians, particularly these working companies as Christians, to behave in an accepting Christian method and embrace all who hunt down their companies.
Ellen Creane
Guilford, Conn.
To the Editor:
What about interracial marriage? There are these with sincerely held non secular beliefs who cite scriptural references that help segregation of the races, as do those that justify their anti-gay bias on this method. Certainly, these biblical passages had been used within the Southern states to justify Jim Crow legal guidelines again within the period of lynchings.
Ought to these folks be capable to refuse service for interracial {couples}? If not, why not? It could appear that some scriptural cherry-picking is in impact right here.
Justice Clarence Thomas has a white spouse. It could be candy justice if the Thomases had been denied service after they attempt to order an anniversary cake.
In different phrases, it is a slippery slope.
Don Budzinski
Evanston, Unwell.
To the Editor:
Re “Christians and Drag Queens Each Defend the First Modification,” by David French (column, July 1):
I agree that freedom of speech consists of each letting somebody give hateful speech (if not inciting violence) and likewise not forcing somebody to talk towards their conscience.
That mentioned, how is an internet designer who creates a marriage web page for a homosexual couple seen as being pressured to talk towards her conscience? The speech is the homosexual couple’s, not hers. She offers a service, however nobody assumes the phrases are hers.
What am I lacking (that almost all of justices should be lacking as properly)?
James Berkman
Plymouth, Vt.
To the Editor:
The vast majority of this Supreme Court docket has been content material to disregard precedent in imposing its views on the general public. Now it extends its disdain for hundreds of years of our jurisprudence by deciding a case during which the plaintiff lacked standing.
Lorie Smith, the net designer, wasn’t contesting a penalty imposed for her enterprise’s failure to adjust to Colorado regulation; in truth she had but even to begin her wedding ceremony enterprise.
Why then was the difficulty offered on this case determined? Can there be any doubt that six members of the court docket issued the ruling solely to require the general public to comply with their views? This isn’t the function of a court docket, at the same time as activist as the present one. We nonetheless have a legislative and an govt department. The court docket’s majority continues to usurp its authority in an unprecedented energy seize.
Samuel Rosen
New York
Care, Not Jail, for Drug Customers
To the Editor:
Re “Punitive Legal guidelines Over Fentanyl Renew a Combat” (entrance web page, June 23):
The overdose disaster is devastating communities throughout this nation, however placing folks in jail doesn’t lower drug use. Many years of failed punitive insurance policies have confirmed that already.
It’s misguided and infuriating to see opportunistic elected officers push federal and state legal guidelines to deliver again lengthy obligatory minimal jail sentences and cost folks with homicide in the event that they equipped medicine that comprise fentanyl and led to somebody’s demise from an overdose.
Criminalization and incarceration should not the reply. Might was the fiftieth anniversary of New York’s disgraced Rockefeller drug legal guidelines, which incarcerated New Yorkers for 15 years to life for possessing a couple of ounces of cocaine.
And whereas drug use doesn’t discriminate, our drug insurance policies do, with Black and different folks of colour disproportionately focused, arrested and incarcerated for medicine.
Overdosing is a well being disaster, and we must be mounting a sturdy health-based technique in response. We must be ensuring that people who find themselves utilizing medicine have naloxone, safer drug use provides and drug checking instruments. We have to present overdose prevention facilities, treatment therapy entry, and sensible info and help.
We will’t deliver again the lives we’ve already misplaced. However by specializing in care as a substitute of criminalization, we are able to make progress within the face of a disaster that’s claiming greater than 100,000 lives a 12 months.
Tony Newman
Brooklyn
The author is director of communication for the Overdose Prevention Program at Very important Methods.
Your Wordle Scores: Ability or Luck?
To the Editor:
I, together with so many different Occasions readers, will need to have my each day Wordle repair. Like numerous different video games, the way you fare has each a ability and a luck part.
In Wordle’s early days, I discovered myself complaining (justifiably, I inform you!) {that a} poor rating of mine was because of unhealthy luck — when, for instance, the reply was any of 4 prospects and ability had no function in selecting amongst them.
However with the creation of The Occasions’s WordleBot, which evaluates your path to a profitable reply and quantifies how a lot ability and luck obtained you there, we are able to now take a look at the verity of — throughout the Wordle context at the least — the adage “It’s higher to be fortunate than good.”
Based mostly on 90 days or so of each day video games, I in contrast my Wordle ability and luck scores every day with these of your entire household of Occasions Wordle addicts. Utilizing a really rudimentary statistical evaluation, it seems that … look forward to it … it’s certainly higher to be fortunate than good! Whereas ability is essential to routinely doing properly within the recreation, luck could also be greater than twice as essential.
The following time your good friend lords their higher rating over you, be at liberty to dismiss it as dumb luck. Down the highway, although, your good friend could have the appropriate to do the identical to you.
Neil G. Bennett
Stamford, Conn.
