Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie slammed leftist Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Sunday for her dissent in the Court’s ruling last week that a Colorado law that would have required a Christian graphic designer to design a website for a same-sex wedding was illegal.
In a 6-3 decision in the case of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the Court cited the First Amendment in ruling that Lorie Smith could not be forced by state civil rights law to design websites that run counter to her sincerely-held religious beliefs.
Christie was asked where he stood on the ruling during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” with host Dana Bash.
“I stand with Justice Gorsuch,” Christie said. “Look, and the thing that’s bad about the dissenting opinion is that it mischaracterizes the decision. This business has no right not to serve people of a protected class. But, by the same token, the government doesn’t have the right to tell a business the nature of how they need to use their expressive abilities.”
“And so the fact is that this — this business can’t deny LGBTQ people, couples from coming in and trying to access this business. That’s not the case at all. It’s a mischaracterization of it,” he explained. “What concerns me the most is that, for decades and decades, the Democratic Party cheered a Supreme Court that went outside the Constitution, made extraconstitutional decisions, in my opinion, because the decisions went in a philosophical direction that they liked.”
“Now, when the court makes decisions that they don’t like, all of a sudden, the court is a not-normal court, according to President Biden,” he continued. “This is a results-oriented type of judgment. Instead, what they should look at is the way they analyze the law. And as a lawyer and someone who’s watched this for a long time, I think Justice Gorsuch made a decision that protects all of our First Amendment rights.”
Christie said that if Democrats “were being ordered by a state to do something that they felt restricted their rights, they’d be angry about it, and should be. We should not be restricting people’s First Amendment rights.”
Christie then took specific aim at what Sotomayor said when asked if the decision could be used in a more expansive way.
“Look, what Sonia Sotomayor, the justice, Sotomayor, was saying in her opinion was that they could — that this decision could be used to deny people of LGBTQ backgrounds the ability to access this business. That’s simply not true,” he said. “They can access this business. They can access this business. They just can’t force the owner to do something that is against her personal religious beliefs. And so if they want to come in and they want a web design for their business, they want a web design for a charity, they want a web design for anything else that they’re doing, they could certainly do that.”
“And she knows that’s true. But she’s trying to inflame people with this decision,” he continued. “And it is a very narrow decision. And, no, I’m not concerned that it would, because I will tell you what would happen. If someone tried to do that, people in that particular state would be into court immediately if they were trying to go beyond this decision.”
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