Friend:

Despite many setbacks in recent years, our country continues its steady march towards equality. On Tuesday, a bipartisan majority in the Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act to protect the marriages of same-sex and interracial couples. 

Americans United urged senators to pass this historic legislation and clarified that religious freedom does not include the right to discriminate or the right to use the law to impose one’s religious beliefs on the marriages of others. The bill now heads back to the House for a vote and then to President Joe Biden for his signature. 

Congress needed to do something to protect all families, including those of same-sex and interracial couples, because the ultra-conservative members of the Supreme Court have signaled a willingness to overturn the precedent protecting marriage equality—just as they did with Roe v. Wade.

Alarmingly, both LGBTQ equality and racial equality are back before the Justices this coming week.

On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in a case that challenges the equality we’ve fought so hard to win. Based on the company owner’s religious beliefs, 303 Creative LLC, a website design business, wants to refuse service to an unknown same-sex couple in some hypothetical future sale of design services for a wedding website, despite a clear civil rights law prohibiting such discrimination. That sounds convoluted because this isn’t a real case—the business wasn’t even asked to design anything by any same-sex couple, but challenged the state civil rights law anyway. 

The Alliance Defending Freedom is behind this attack. ADF is the same group that defended the Colorado bakery that discriminated against Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins at the Court back in 2018. (Look for my Shadow Network series email on ADF this week.) The threat to marriage equality is obvious in the 303 Creative LLC case, but we may need to peel back a layer to reveal the threat to racial equality. 

Civil rights laws grew out of the American experience with racial segregation and Jim Crow. Sometimes called public accommodations laws, they were implemented to end that hateful history and tradition. And they worked. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained to the ADF lawyer during oral argument in the 2018 case: “America’s reaction to mixed marriages and to race didn’t change on its own. It changed because we had public accommodation laws that forced people to do things that many claimed were against their expressive rights and against their religious rights.”

During that argument, no lawyer or justice could credibly explain how allowing exemptions from civil rights laws would not inevitably lead to more racial discrimination. That’s because it would. And it’s not just racial and LGBTQ bigotry that will increase. As our joint amicus brief to the court pointed out, religious minorities will also suffer when we allow religious extremists to rip holes in civil rights protections. I’ll be listening closely to this line of questioning during the oral argument on Monday.

The reason we are facing such resistance is because of America’s progress towards greater equality, like we saw this past week with the Respect for Marriage Act. Thank you for helping Americans United fight for freedom without favor and equality without exception in every way we can.

With hope and determination,

Rachel K. Laser
President and CEO