The Supreme Court considers whether to force Americans to celebrate activity they consider sinful, the White House makes its push for big tech censorship, and moderate Republicans consider whether to give Democrats a deal on immigration. All that and more on this week s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show with Ben Shapiro. Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro Podcast and other conservative media outlets wherever you get your news and discuss what s going on in the world. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family. The opinions expressed in this podcast are our own, not those of our corporations, and are not related to any organization, organization or political party. If you like what you hear here, please consider becoming a patron patron of the show. It helps keep us on track with our monthly commitment to providing quality conservative news and commentary. We post polls, questions and thoughts on both social medias, and the results/comments are featured on the episodes as well. Send your voice messages to sws@whatiwatchedtonight.co.uk and we'll get them on the show! Thanks again for listening your continued support is so appreciated and appreciated. Peace, Blessings, Cheers, Ben Shapiro - The Best Fiends - Timestamps: 5:00 - 6:00 7:30 8:15 9:40 11:00 | 12:30 | 15:15 | 16:40 | 17: What does God have in store for you? 18:40 // 19:00 // 21: Is God a God? 21: What is God Good? 25:00 / 26: 27:30 // 26:00 ? 27: What do you think of me? 29:00 Or do you have a God Like Me? 32:00 + 33:00? 35:00/36:00 Is God Good or Do I Have a Good Idea? 36:00 & 37:00 Are you a Bigger? 39: Is He a Bigot? 40:00 Can I Have It? 45:00 Do You Have a Problem with My Opinion? 47:00 or Do You Think I Don t I Have A Problem With My Opinion of My Opinion Of My Opinion On This? 44:00 And So Much More? 46:00 Don t Think Like That? Theme Music by Ian Dorsch?
00:00:23.000Get ExpressVPN right now at ExpressVPN.com.
00:00:26.000Well, the Supreme Court is taking up the question of same-sex marriage once again.
00:00:30.000All of these questions follow hard upon the Supreme Court declaring in the Obergefell case, of course, that same-sex marriage must be elevated to the level of traditional marriage.
00:00:38.000In fact, marriage must be redefined as not between a man and a woman.
00:00:41.000for the purposes of producing children. Instead, marriage will now be defined as two people of any sex living together under the boundaries of the law, essentially. Monogamous, nom, not, doesn't really matter as long as it is two people of any sex. That is the new definition of marriage, according to Justice Anthony Kennedy and a 5-4 majority in the Obergefell case.
00:01:00.000Well, this bears a lot of consequences because when you redefine marriage, this now raises questions as to how much are people allowed to act in accordance with their own viewpoints on marriage. Because once the Supreme Court has declared a redefinition of an institution as fundamental as marriage, and once the Supreme Court has also declared that same-sex marriage is on a par with traditional marriage and thus that anybody who does not believe that is in some sense a bigot, what exactly do you do with people who don't believe that?
00:01:30.000Which, for nearly all of human history, was nearly all humans.
00:01:33.000What exactly do you do with all the people who do not go along with the idea that two men or two women being married to one another is the same thing as a man being married to a woman?
00:01:43.000Or what about people who aren't religious?
00:01:44.000Who just believe that, for example, society has more of a stake in men and women being married to one another than it does in two men living together or two women living together, which is obviously and patently true.
00:01:53.000What exactly do you do with those people?
00:01:54.000And this has now raised its head at the level of the Supreme Court.
00:01:57.000So, the Supreme Court looks as though it is going to move along the lines of what has been called the Utah Compromise.
00:02:03.000The Utah Compromise is set out in the state of Utah.
00:02:06.000Essentially what it does, it creates a very strict non-discrimination law that includes things like sexual orientation.
00:02:13.000And then it creates massive carve-outs for people of religious faith.
00:02:16.000So basically what it says is, you are not allowed to quote-unquote discriminate against people who are gay or lesbian.
00:02:22.000However, if you are a religious person, then we have a big religious carve-out for you, that you are allowed to act in accordance with your religion.
00:02:28.000That seems to be the compromise the Supreme Court is going to draw.
00:02:31.000However, is that going to be the long-term compromise that is accepted by the left?
00:02:36.000The left will not be happy until you, personally, are celebrating all of the activities they deem to be good and useful.
00:02:42.000That is the entire purpose of having government elevate same-sex marriage to the level of traditional marriage.
00:02:46.000After all, the benefits of same-sex marriage have already been granted to same-sex couples under the law nearly everywhere across the country, with things like civil unions.
00:02:55.000So why exactly was there a push to elevate this to the level of marriage?
00:02:58.000It wasn't for legal purposes, it was because the government was supposed to be a god-like creation that now discerned what was good and what was evil, and anybody who crossed the government's view of what was good and what was evil must be punished by the great god of government.
00:03:10.000What we have here is not actually a secular worldview contrasted with a religious worldview.
00:03:15.000We actually have our two religious worldviews, a religious secularist worldview and a religious religious worldview, a traditional religious worldview.
00:03:23.000And the secular religious worldview is imperialistic.
00:03:25.000They believe that it is their job to make sure that you, in your life, approve of all the activities they say are good.
00:03:32.000And they're going to use the power of the law as much as they can in order to compel you to believe these things.
00:03:36.000Now, the Supreme Court is currently constituted and is not going to do that.
00:03:39.000Likely 6-3, the Supreme Court is going to say that religious people are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, at least insofar as their creative practice of their art, for example.
00:03:51.000However, what this case really highlights, there's a case before the Supreme Court right now that was heard yesterday in oral argument.
00:03:58.000And this case was about a graphic designer in Colorado who's claiming a free speech right under the First Amendment to refuse to create websites celebrating same-sex weddings because of her Christian faith despite a state law that forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation.
00:04:09.000This is basically a variation on the same case that we saw with Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cake Shop.
00:04:14.000Who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding.
00:04:17.000And then as soon as he refused to do that, and the Supreme Court said he's correct and okay in doing that, as soon as that happened, he was hit with, well, bake us a cake, a transgender celebration cake.
00:04:27.000And now he finds himself back in front of the Colorado woke commissars.
00:04:32.000Being forced into re-education programs.
00:04:34.000This is the way that this battle is going to go.
00:04:36.000This is why you can't redefine fundamental social institutions along the line of secularism without also mandating the rest of it.
00:04:43.000There is no halfway solution here that the left is willing to accept.
00:04:47.000Because what they really want out of all of this is not just tolerance and diversity.
00:04:51.000What they actually want is celebration.
00:04:53.000All of this ties into a broader belief about identity, which is that the true identity, the true you, is all of your sexual passions.
00:05:00.000And it's not enough for other people to acknowledge that you have those sexual passions.
00:05:04.000Those people must celebrate them, because otherwise they are denying your identity, and if they deny your identity, that is an act of discrimination, and it's an act of cruelty, it's an act of bigotry, and it means that you are bad, and you are mean, and you are doing, essentially, violence to them.
00:05:17.000This is the philosophy that has taken over nearly all of the university system.
00:05:20.000It has taken over at a lot of major companies.
00:05:23.000And it is a philosophy that eventually will end up taking over in the law unless there is significant pushback from traditionally minded and frankly rational people in the United States who at the very least have to agree to some sort of compromise on this issue.
00:05:36.000But there will be no compromise with the left.
00:05:37.000But again, the entire goal here is celebration.
00:05:40.000The entire goal here is you will be made to care.
00:05:42.000You can say as much as you want because Again, people who are in favor of traditional marriage have been saying it for decades.
00:05:47.000Do what you want in the privacy of your own home.
00:05:53.000What they want is for you to celebrate.
00:05:55.000What they want is for you to bake the cake, bigot.
00:05:57.000What they want is for you to create the website, bigot.
00:06:00.000What they want is for you to have to change your viewpoint about what is right and wrong, about any sort of hierarchy of acceptable moral behavior in the sexual realm.
00:06:10.000You're supposed to change all of that because they want you to change all of that.
00:06:14.000And if you don't, they're going to say that you're tantamount to a bigot who believes that white people shouldn't marry black people, for example.
00:06:20.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:06:21.000First, will the lack of a red wave during the midterms lead to more reckless spending by a more emboldened administration?
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00:08:46.000The reason I say this is because race is in fact an immutable characteristic.
00:08:49.000This is why everyone still today, despite all of our wokeness, everyone still laughs when Rachel Dolezal, a white lady, claims that she is black.
00:08:56.000The reason everybody laughs is because that's absurd.
00:08:58.000You cannot be a white person who is black.
00:09:46.000A gay person who is married to a woman and acts in straight ways sexually It's very difficult to explain how societally that is different from being a straight person.
00:09:56.000The distinction between behavior and an immutable characteristic like race is very deeply drawn philosophically, but it's been completely obliterated in modern society where we say that it is exactly the same to say that somebody's sexual behavior is wrong as to say that somebody's race is wrong, right?
00:10:14.000Say somebody's race is wrong, that makes you a bigot.
00:10:16.000Say somebody's sexual behavior is wrong, that makes you a traditional moralist because behavior Throughout Western civilization has always been treated as a component of your capacity to make decisions about your own life.
00:10:26.000And people can judge those decisions and whether those are good or bad.
00:10:29.000Okay, so that is one distinction that has been completely obliterated.
00:10:32.000The other distinction that's been completely obliterated is the distinction between state action and private action.
00:10:37.000This is something that happened under the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
00:10:40.000And you understand the temporary necessity for it.
00:10:43.000In 1965, there was an attempt to Destroy segregation in the United States, correctly.
00:10:48.000To destroy racial discrimination in the United States, correctly.
00:10:52.000However, what the Civil Rights Act of 1965 did is a couple of separate things.
00:10:56.000One, it said government can no longer discriminate because Jim Crow was, in fact, a government regime.
00:11:03.000Jim Crow is a series of laws that existed in the states that mandated that restaurants, for example, have separate black and white areas.
00:11:10.000In Alabama, there are actual laws on the books mandating that if you were going to build water fountains, you had to have a black water fountain and a white water fountain.
00:12:12.000The First Amendment still applies to them.
00:12:15.000And so, Freedom does not mean that I approve of all the ways you use your freedom.
00:12:19.000However, for the federal government to come in in 1965 and say that private persons, who are not the government, are now forbidden by law from discriminating in quote-unquote public accommodations, for example, is a violation of constitutional freedoms, even if you like the outcome of that.
00:12:35.000And this is an argument that Barry Goldwater famously made in 1964.
00:12:38.000And then he was ripped up and down because, again, people made the dishonest argument that if you are in favor of the freedom, this must mean that you like all the ways that the freedom is used, which, of course, is the road to fascism.
00:12:46.000Because if you think that freedom is secondary on a governmental level, that freedom on a governmental level is secondary to how the freedom is used, meaning we only give you freedom if you use it in the ways that we approve, you don't actually have the freedom.
00:12:58.000The government just gets to tell you what to do each and every day.
00:13:00.000This is a point made by Christopher Caldwell in his book The Age of Entitlement.
00:13:04.000There's been essentially a second constitutional bargain drawn by the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the acts that came immediately afterward in terms of compelling private behavior that never would have been foreseen by anybody at the time of the founding or for most of Western history.
00:13:18.000The idea that the government could force you into doing these things in your private life.
00:13:22.000So when you conflate these two philosophical obliterations, the obliteration between immutable characteristic and behavior, and the obliteration between public and private, what you end up with is the government can tell you to do whatever it wants you to do.
00:13:35.000And it can tell you that you're no longer allowed to quote-unquote discriminate on the basis of behavior.
00:13:39.000This is how you end up with a full left-wing argument that the government is now going to redefine marriage, and the government is going to force you, the private actor, to actually discard your own principles and your own belief system in favor of approving of, not immutable characteristics, in favor of approving behavior.
00:13:55.000Behavior that you don't think is good.
00:13:57.000Behavior that you don't think is right.
00:13:58.000Behavior that you may consider sinful.
00:13:59.000Force you to participate in it and celebrate it using your artistic license.
00:14:03.000This is the case that was made by three of the justices on the Supreme Court yesterday.
00:14:07.000It's the case that is routinely made on the left.
00:14:10.000According to the New York Times, several justices leaning in favor of the designer, there's a web designer again who says that she does not wish to use web designing skills to celebrate same-sex marriage, appear to be searching for limiting principles so as not to upend all sorts of anti-discrimination law.
00:14:22.000But of course, this is the problem because the truth is anti-discrimination laws in many ways are unconstitutional.
00:14:29.000Anti-discrimination laws You can be very much anti-discrimination and think discrimination is wrong and evil and bad and still believe that the government does not have the right to compel people to violate their own personal precepts on things like association.
00:14:44.000Both of those things hold together very clearly.
00:14:46.000The left likes to play this game, and they will play this game, right?
00:14:48.000They'll take clips from this show today, and they will say that if I say that anti-discrimination laws are badly drawn and violate First Amendment freedoms, this means I'm in favor of discrimination.
00:15:09.000It's one of the beauties of the free market.
00:15:10.000If there's a company today that says, I refuse to serve Jews, there'll be another company that says, I will serve Jews, and that company will out-compete the first company.
00:15:19.000But the idea here is that because we redrew the constitutional bargain, we ended up with two mutually exclusive ideas.
00:15:26.000One, the government can mandate behavior.
00:15:28.000Two, the Constitution of the United States, the government cannot mandate behavior.
00:15:32.000And these two things are not compatible.
00:15:34.000And so there's been this awkward balance that the Supreme Court is attempting to draw where they say, well, the government can tell you that certain things you're not allowed to do, but if you're a religious person, maybe you could still do those things.
00:15:43.000Or the government can tell you that you can do certain types of discrimination, but not other types of discrimination.
00:15:48.000And the left correctly says, well, wait, hold up a second.
00:15:51.000We already obliterated the Constitution.
00:15:54.000All that's left is an anti-discrimination rubric under which we get to decide what you can say and what you can do.
00:15:59.000It is not a coincidence that the same people who are pushing to use Obergefell as a baton to wield against religious institutions and not only institutions, religious human beings on a personal level in their lives, because it turns out religious people aren't just religious in their churches or their synagogues.
00:16:15.000Religious people are religious all throughout their lives.
00:16:18.000And as I've said before, the argument for traditional marriage does not rely on religion.
00:16:21.000But now, basically, the Supreme Court is deciding, if you're a secular person, a person who doesn't go to church all that often, and you believe that traditional marriage is more important societally than same-sex marriage, so you don't wish to celebrate same-sex marriage, if you do that and you don't say the word God, then apparently the government can crack down on you.
00:16:37.000But if you do say the word God, then the government cannot crack down on you.
00:16:41.000It's nothing like what the Constitution was written to do.
00:16:44.000This also, by the way, goes to the heart of what the Bill of Rights originally was supposed to be.
00:16:48.000There was a big argument when the Bill of Rights was drawn over whether to even draw a Bill of Rights.
00:16:52.000The people who were in favor of the Bill of Rights said, we need to make very clear there are things that the government cannot do.
00:16:58.000And people who opposed the Bill of Rights, they said, well, here is the problem.
00:17:00.000What you are doing is you are creating little spheres where the government can't go.
00:17:05.000But then the implication is the government can go everywhere those little spheres are not.
00:17:09.000And so if you draw a Bill of Rights, what you're basically doing is you are carving out negative space against the encroachment of the government, but allowing the government to overrun everything else.
00:17:17.000And that's not what the Bill of Rights was designed to do.
00:17:20.000The people who opposed the Bill of Rights were actually very much in favor of what they called the Structural Constitution, meaning all the stuff in the Constitution before the Bill of Rights, which actually is the important part, meaning the government was never supposed to have the power, at least on the federal level, to do any of this stuff.
00:17:32.000The federal government was never supposed to have the power to invade your business and tell you how to conduct your business in this way.
00:17:38.000The founders would have appalled at that.
00:17:40.000Nobody would have signed a constitution that was rooted in that notion.
00:17:43.000And yet, of course, we've upended that entire balance.
00:17:45.000And so now the left says, OK, well, we upended the balance.
00:17:47.000The Constitution is no longer relevant.
00:17:49.000We will have a full anti-discrimination regime that will tell you what to do and what to say.
00:17:53.000And these are the same people who obviously believe that we should have things like hate speech laws that prevent you from using your First Amendment freedoms to say things they don't like because these do emotional damage.
00:18:02.000Again, it's not a coincidence that all the people who want to control your life in terms of how you handle your business and how you handle your church and how you handle raising your kids also want to control your life in terms of how you speak.
00:18:10.000It's very important to them that we do all of this because the bottom line is what they want is to be able to tell you what is good and what is bad.
00:18:18.000It is a new moral writ brought down, not from a mountain.
00:18:24.000Instead, the new moral writ is going to come from the hearts and minds of the most liberated among us, the people who are not subjected to the institutional predations of history and tradition.
00:18:33.000Those people are going to bring a new set of tablets, and those tablets will be erected in every school in the country.
00:18:42.000Instead, we'll have the new tablets, and it'll be things like the gay pride flag in classrooms, and it'll be things like same-sex marriage being taught to five-year-olds.
00:18:51.000These will be the things that are very important and taught because it's a new religious mode, and you will be forced to accept this by the government.
00:19:00.000Because again, they're exploiting this gap that was created in 1965.
00:19:03.000And again, you can make the case in 1965 that on a temporary basis, the federal government, as a practical matter, needed to be able to cudgel people away from bigotry.
00:19:13.000I think that the federal government was perfectly justified in going to the states and obliterating all of the segregation regimes that existed in the states.
00:19:20.000I do not think that the federal government had the power constitutionally or morally or philosophically to compel individuals Not to engage in constitutionally protected behavior, even behavior I don't particularly like.
00:19:29.000Like, for example, banning Jews at country clubs.
00:19:32.000Not in favor of banning Jews at country clubs.
00:19:34.000I'm not in favor of banning black people from restaurants.
00:19:36.000Do I think that the government, the federal government, had the power to compel the individual bed and breakfast owner to determine that the federal government could override that person's priorities in terms of who they had in their house?
00:19:47.000No, I don't think the federal government had that power.
00:19:49.000However, you could at least make the temporary moral case that this is something that had to be done in order to get over several centuries of blatant and evil racial discrimination.
00:19:59.000But the problem is that essentially that exception has now eaten the entire system of law and the left knows it.
00:20:05.000And they are pushing this all the way to its limit.
00:20:07.000And if it were not for a conservative Supreme Court majority, they would get what they want, which is to obliterate all traditional religion from the public square.
00:20:15.000To shift it and mold it into basically a version of secularism with a tiny little cross on the side.
00:20:23.000And basically all of these secular precepts, except you say God once in a while.
00:20:27.000And God can be a he or a she in this particular version.
00:20:29.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:22:31.000Brett Kavanaugh says the case comes down to a fairly narrow question.
00:22:33.000Are they more like restaurants and jewelers and tailors in terms of the quote-unquote discrimination of the website owner?
00:22:38.000Or are they more like, you know, the publishing houses and other free speech analogs?
00:22:41.000Again, because of these incompatible legal principles, the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act, in terms of private behavior being mandated by the federal government, because these are incompatible, The Supreme Court is now having to come up with all sorts of other distinctions on the right.
00:22:56.000The left is making a perfectly consistent case.
00:23:00.000The right is attempting to draw new distinctions.
00:23:02.000So what are the philosophical distinctions that separate behavior that the government can compel, say, for example, non-bigotry racially from behavior the government cannot compel, say, religious behavior?
00:23:14.000And so Brett Kavanaugh is trying to draw a distinction based on the kind of services that are provided.
00:23:18.000So the idea here is that you violate Antony.
00:23:20.000If you're a religious person, And you run a restaurant, and you decide as a restaurant that you just don't want to serve same-sex couples.
00:23:31.000Brett Kavanaugh would say yes, but if you are running a website that involves inherently creative service, these are very, very wavery lines.
00:23:38.000As the left correctly points out, it is a wavery line.
00:23:40.000The person who runs the restaurant undoubtedly believes they are engaging in a creative activity.
00:23:44.000That is why they are engaged in the restaurant business.
00:23:46.000If you're a jeweler and you make special jewelry for people, how is that wildly different from making special websites for people?
00:23:53.000This is a very vague distinction that Brett Kavanaugh is attempting to draw.
00:23:57.000I understand why he's attempting to do it, because he's attempting to redraw some sort of line that protects religious freedom.
00:24:02.000But again, the history of American law suggests that the obliteration has already been done.
00:24:07.000It's just a matter of how far the obliteration is going to go and how long it's going to take to get there.
00:24:11.000Justice Neil Gorsuch focused on the difference between a client's message and that of the designer.
00:24:15.000Gorsuch said, that's at the heart of this, is expressing the maker's point of view versus the couple's point of view.
00:24:20.000So, is there a difference between, for example, serving a gay couple at a restaurant when they're not actually asking you to bake a cake for them, or baking a cake for them, right?
00:24:28.000Amy Coney Barrett said, it's about the message, not about the sexuality of the couple.
00:24:32.000So again, focusing in on sort of the message.
00:24:35.000Samuel Alito says there's a difference between discrimination based on race versus sexual orientation, which is the actual correct answer here.
00:24:43.000That goes back to the original obliteration that we talked about, the distinction between immutable characteristics and behavior that we have completely destroyed in our society.
00:24:53.000But the reason these issues are being turned over in the first place is because of a grand constitutional violations that have taken place over the course of decades to completely redraw the balance between government and the individual.
00:25:05.000Can you have imagined decades, forget decades ago, one decade ago, Would it be possible to imagine?
00:25:10.000I did, because I suggested this was going to happen when the left enshrined same-sex marriage.
00:25:13.000I wrote columns about this, saying this is exactly what was going to happen as early as 2012-2013.
00:25:18.000Ten years ago, when you said to people, guys, if same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land, the next thing that will happen is an attempt to compel individuals to violate their own precepts.
00:25:30.000People are like, no, we don't want that.
00:25:32.000Again, part of the slippery slope that was essentially inevitable from about the 1990s.
00:25:38.000The slippery slope that went from leave us alone in our houses, to we want civil unions, to we want same-sex marriage, to we want to indoctrinate your children that all forms of sexual behavior are equivalent, and you have to celebrate this in your own personal life and business.
00:25:50.000That slippery slope was pretty much inevitable, and some of us could see it coming and predicted it.
00:26:18.000They had a right to march there because that's what freedom of speech is all about.
00:26:20.000Now the ACLU says, essentially, you must be forced to celebrate.
00:26:25.000Quote, can an artist be compelled to create a website for an event she does not condone?
00:26:28.000That's the question the Supreme Court has said it will take up on Monday.
00:26:31.000The answer would seem to be obviously no, but that's the wrong question.
00:26:34.000The right answer, the right question is whether someone who chooses to open a business to the public should have the right to turn away gay customers simply because the service she would provide for them is expressive or artistic.
00:26:45.000So the real question is, should we force you to use your artistic abilities to celebrate a thing?
00:26:51.000Now, again, as I say, I think that on a broad philosophical level, we shouldn't force anybody to have to provide services to anyone they don't want.
00:27:14.000It is government as God, the great arbiter of right and wrong, and it will compel you through power of law, materially, now, in a way that God does not even do.
00:27:23.000It will compel you using all of the tools and powers at its disposal to worship at the altar of its morality.
00:27:31.000Again, it's the head of the ACLU, the National Legal Director of the ACLU.
00:27:36.000It's about civil liberties, and they're like, we don't care about civil liberties anymore.
00:27:38.000We care about the gods of left-wing social morality.
00:27:45.000The ACLU has been the nation's leading defender of free speech for more than a century.
00:27:48.000We firmly believe states cannot compel artists or anyone else to express messages with which they disagree.
00:27:52.000But we filed an amicus brief supporting Colorado in this case.
00:27:56.000We defended the same law five years ago on behalf of the gay couple denied service by Masterpiece Cake Shop.
00:28:00.000We did so because Colorado's law does not do what 303 Creative Claims does.
00:28:04.000Public accommodations laws, which have been on the books since the 19th century, ensure that everyone has equal access to the public marketplace without regard to attributes historically marking them for second-class status.
00:28:38.000I mean, that would historically mark them as second class.
00:28:41.000Presumably the ACLU would say, yes, the law would have to force you to do that.
00:28:45.000Those laws don't trigger serious First Amendment concerns because they treat all businesses equally, whether they take corporate headshots or serve burgers and fries.
00:28:51.000The purpose of the law is not to dictate the contents of anyone's speech, but to make sure nobody is denied goods or services in commercial markets for discriminatory reasons.
00:28:58.000Well, again, the the obliteration, the creation of a new distinction between me providing my goods and services in my creative work every day with that guy over there who draws a picture.
00:29:07.000I think that's a distinction without a difference.
00:29:10.000I think it's a level of high-class arrogance to suggest that a guy who is a mechanic somehow is not using his creative faculties, but the guy down the street who's writing garbage poetry somehow is.
00:29:23.000Or if you make a website that this is different in kind from a person who makes food.
00:29:30.000The left is asking why and they're saying that the difference does not exist and therefore the government should be able to cram it down on everything.
00:29:56.000The fact that we have caved on this over the course of the last several decades and then draw a bunch of very weak distinctions in order to kind of shore up the internal structure, that is a structure that over time is not going to hold.
00:30:06.000And you can see it in the questions that are being asked by the left.
00:30:09.000So, for example, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, in the oral arguments, she says, well, how about a shop that only sells to Protestants?
00:30:15.000Now, again, you can make distinctions here.
00:30:17.000But here is Ketanji Brown-Jackson asking the lawyer, Kristen Wagoner, for 303 Creative.
00:30:23.000Speech is speech, whether it's paid or pro bono.
00:30:26.000But don't we have cases that suggest that people's conduct can be expressive?
00:30:30.000I thought there was a whole line of cases that said you didn't have to actually have an express message, you could be acting in such a way as to express a message.
00:30:39.000And in my restaurant hypo, I'm saying if I sell to non-Protestants, I'd be expressing a message contrary to Grandma Helen's core beliefs.
00:30:50.000You're speaking through conduct at that point, and that is a different analysis.
00:30:54.000In terms of the expressive conduct test, the court has already articulated what those tests are and what a reasonable person would observe.
00:31:00.000But in that case, you're talking essentially about status discrimination.
00:31:04.000There's no message that she is creating that would be compelled in that way.
00:31:12.000Okay, so the lawyer for 303 Creative, to decode that, is saying two things.
00:31:16.000One, there's a distinction between expressive conduct and non-expressive conduct, meaning between 303 Creative's website designer using creative powers versus the restaurant owner who's just serving food to everybody.
00:31:25.000And two, that there's a difference between saying, I will not serve a gay customer and saying, I will not celebrate a gay marriage.
00:31:32.000You know, those logical distinctions may exist, but Ketanji Brown-Jackson is saying, why should they?
00:31:37.000And it's not actually a horrible question by Ketanji Brown-Jackson, right?
00:31:40.000Ketanji Brown-Jackson is saying, well, I mean, why should, why?
00:31:45.000If you say that I cannot, two men walk in, they're married to each other, and they say, we want you to make us a cake that celebrates our marriage.
00:31:52.000Why is that any different from them walking in and wanting to just buy a cake that doesn't celebrate their marriage?
00:31:58.000Now, you can draw the distinction, But it seems to be expressive conduct in both ways, right?
00:32:05.000I mean, begging a cake is an act of creative willpower.
00:32:08.000In other words, I don't think that the left actually has a terrible case.
00:32:11.000I think the left has a terrible principle.
00:32:14.000Is that once the right has conceded many of the principles that the left wanted to push, that the government has the power to compel in these areas.
00:32:20.000I do not think a Utah Compromise in the long term is possible.
00:32:22.000I do not think the left will ever accept a Utah Compromise.
00:32:25.000I also think that a Utah Compromise makes an admission against interest that is completely erroneous and specious.
00:32:31.000A Utah Compromise suggesting broad anti-discrimination law but religious carve-outs essentially says the law is moral, religious people aren't.
00:32:41.000The law does not stand above traditional belief about marriage, and the redefinition of marriage is a direct conflict with not only traditional religious belief, but traditional belief generally.
00:32:52.000Pretending that it isn't is inactive foolishness.
00:32:55.000And again, eventually what will end up happening here is that anti-discrimination law will be broadened to include all of the categories that completely destroy traditional religious practice in this country.
00:33:04.000The left is not going to stop any attempts to hold back those waters by building these very fragile legal dams.
00:33:14.000It's going to be very difficult to maintain that over the course of time.
00:33:18.000The only way to really defend traditional freedoms in these areas is to do two things.
00:33:24.000One, minimize the power of government.
00:33:25.000Government does not have these powers.
00:33:26.000Regardless of what you believe about marriage, government should not have the power to compel this sort of stuff.
00:33:31.000And the other way is an aggressive defense of traditional marriage by people who actually believe in traditional marriage and who left the battlefield screaming with their hair on fire out of cowardice about 15, 20, 30 years ago.
00:33:42.000If those two things don't happen, then the secular left push to take over the instruments of power and then use them to clobber anybody who they disagree with will continue.
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00:35:31.000Okay, so the left knows what they want, and what they want is complete dominance over your life.
00:35:36.000Karine Jean-Pierre, World's Worst Press Secretary, she announced that yesterday.
00:35:39.000She says that this case before the Supreme Court is really about ensuring that everybody gets the services that they want at any time from you.
00:35:45.000I mean, that's really what it means, from you.
00:35:48.000They're going to dictate what you must do with your business, with your life.
00:35:53.000The right to free speech, and we support ensuring that no one is discriminated against or refused services because of who they love and who they are.
00:36:02.000And so, as you know, we've been very clear about that.
00:36:04.000The administration believes that every person, no matter their sex, race, religion, or who they love, should have the equal access to society, including access to products and services on the same terms as other members of public.
00:36:37.000What we're talking about, when they say goods and services in the social sphere, they mean you.
00:36:41.000They mean that you should be forced to do whatever the government wants you to do.
00:36:44.000Yamiche Alcindor, who is supposedly a journalist for NPR, but essentially is just a propaganda, a propagandist on behalf of the left.
00:36:51.000She says that the web designer in 303 Creative is discriminatory and is looking to discriminate because this is what it's all about.
00:36:57.000Katonji Brown Jackson asks, if you have a photographer who says, I want to take pictures and recreate the Christmases from the 1950s, and I say I only want to put white children with Santa and not black families, is that going to be allowed?
00:37:09.000Now, the lawyers for Lori Smith say that there is a line in that line and that you can't compel anyone to have free speech that's related to something that goes against their personal convictions.
00:37:19.000But in some ways, critics would say this is a very slippery slope.
00:37:23.000You have civil rights groups who are saying what Lori Smith is really looking for is a license to discriminate.
00:37:28.000Right, it's a slippery slope to First Amendment activity.
00:37:32.000It's a slippery slope to people being able to make decisions the government doesn't love, or that I may not love, or that Yamiche Alcindor may not love.
00:37:40.000People do bad things, and the government does not always have the compel, the power to compel people to do good things.
00:37:45.000And that, by the way, is overall a good thing, because if the government has the power to compel everybody to do, quote-unquote, the right things, then that essentially means tyranny.
00:37:53.000Because the right things, according to me, are not going to be the right things, according to Yamiche Alcindor, I would assume.
00:37:59.000Well, the conservative justices, again, because they are attempting to both uphold anti-discrimination laws that are far too overbroad by Colorado's, and also to uphold a constitutional structure that essentially was overturned by a lot of these anti-discrimination laws, as again mentioned by Christopher Caldwell in Age of Enlightenment, because of that, they're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
00:38:16.000And they'll come up with a line here, and the line will be a line that's based on expressive conduct versus non-expressive conduct, or it'll be based on For example, immutable characteristics versus non-immutable characteristics.
00:38:25.000Although I highly doubt they're going to touch that in the aftermath of Obergefell.
00:38:28.000My guess is the line they're going to come down on is some sort of vague line about what constitutes expressive conduct versus non-expressive conduct or artistic performance versus non-artistic performance or whatever else the hell they come up with.
00:38:39.000But everybody understands the consequences if the left gets its way.
00:38:42.000So Justice Gorsuch says the consequences are basically that the government now gets to essentially re-educate everybody.
00:38:47.000He says, you know, Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cake Shop under Colorado's anti-discrimination law was essentially sent to a re-education program.
00:38:54.000But here, they are defining their service by excluding someone based on their... That's their religious belief!
00:39:03.000You can't change their religious belief, right?
00:39:07.000And you protect religious beliefs under the statue, right?
00:39:10.000That is one of the protecting characteristics, in theory.
00:39:15.000If it wasn't in practice, we had heard about it over the past several years, and my friend has pointed to no example where this has been applied.
00:39:24.000Mr. Phillips did go through a re-education training program pursuant to Colorado law, did he not, Mr. Olson?
00:39:31.000He went through a process that ensured he was familiar with... It was a re-education program, right?
00:39:46.000You know, Justice Alito, he points out, you know, guys, it turns out that you're conflating interracial marriage and same-sex marriage, which, by the way, the Senate of the United States, with the approval of 12 feckless Republicans, did the same thing.
00:39:55.000They passed a bill enshrining same-sex marriage as federal law.
00:39:59.000And in that bill, it also said interracial marriage, innately equating the two, which is absurd.
00:40:03.000It is not a redefinition of marriage to include people of different races in man, woman, child.
00:40:08.000That's not a redefinition of marriage.
00:40:10.000In fact, for virtually all of human history, there has been racial mixing in the confines of marriage.
00:40:16.000But here is Justice Alito questioning why the left is trying to conflate these two.
00:40:20.000We know the answer, why they're trying to conflate these two, because again, they're obliterating the distinctions between immutable characteristics and behavior, between private and public behavior, all for the purposes of centralized government power over your life.
00:40:32.000In light of what Justice Kennedy wrote in Obergefell about Honorable people who object to same-sex marriage, do you think it's fair to equate opposition to same-sex marriage with opposition to interracial marriage?
00:40:49.000Yes, because in how the law applies, not in the discussion with folks, because of course honorable people have different views on this issue, but I think when you look at what Justice Kennedy said there, the way to honor that requirement is as this court has set forth in Fulton in Masterpiece of having a rigorous interrogation to make sure that there are neutral and generally applicable laws applied in fact
00:41:18.000that way that don't single out religion.
00:41:19.000Okay, again, what they're what the left is saying pretty openly here is that if you have a belief in traditional modes of sin and non sin, if you have any sort of belief that conflicts, forget about religion, if you have any sort of belief that conflicts with what the left wishes you to believe about anything.
00:41:37.000And this means that they can force you to do what they want you to do.
00:41:42.000And tomorrow, the left could put into law an anti-discrimination statute that says that you're not allowed to discriminate on the basis of environmental politics, for example.
00:41:50.000And then, you're a corporation, and you're an oil corporation.
00:41:54.000They say, well, if you don't do our bidding, this is discrimination on the basis of our environmental policy.
00:42:00.000The left has no moral limits when it comes to this sort of stuff.
00:42:12.000It is whatever the left decides today is the rule, and that is the rule that everyone must live by.
00:42:16.000And this is the inherent danger in giving this much power to government in the first place, no matter whether it was well-motivated, as it was, I'm sure, in the Civil Rights Act.
00:42:24.000As I say, there's a big difference in the Civil Rights Act between provisions of the Civil Rights Act aimed at stopping government-sponsored discrimination, which should have been illegal in the first place.
00:42:33.000Segregation should never have been legal in, for example, Plessy v. Ferguson, or whether you are attempting to reach into the private sphere and obliterate the rights of the individual guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in the name of an overarching anti-discrimination viewpoint that is largely rooted in a secular left-wing morality.
00:42:52.000The Supreme Court is going to come down the right way on this case.
00:42:54.000The warning that I'm giving you is that it will not always be this way.
00:42:57.000And the reason it will not always be this way is because, inexorably, the logic of the left is more consistent here than the logic of the right.
00:43:04.000The logic of the right is that you should be able to pick and choose.
00:43:06.000The government should be able to pick and choose which sort of activities you get to engage in, but there are certain ones that you can, and there are certain ones that you can, and there are certain carve-outs, and there are certain not carve-outs, and the left just says, we control everything.
00:43:17.000We control every bit of this, and we have the power to compel it.