Washington, Colorado and their gay and transgender residents spent the better part of the 2010s and the early 2020s seeking to punish creative professionals for refusing to design products that celebrate same-sex marriage and gender transition, arguing they violated public accommodations laws.Because of their documented hostility toward gender-critical and anti-abortion customers, the WNBA and an Idaho coffee shop, respectively, are facing a taste of the ordeals endured by Masterpiece Cakeshop’s Jack Phillips and Arlene’s Flowers’ Barronelle Stutzman.
The Alliance Defending Freedom warned the professional women’s basketball league that it may be liable for discrimination against supporters of female-only sports under public accommodations laws for the arenas in which its 15 teams play, and may be bound by the First Amendment due to public ownership or financing of those venues.
It emphasized Seattle prohibits discrimination based on “political ideology” in public accommodations, making Storm home games a fertile ground for litigation if Climate Pledge Arena cracks down on gender-critical fans who express themselves. Another WNBA city, Washington, D.C., bans it for “political affiliation.”
First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh notes the California Supreme Court has broadly interpreted its public accommodation law to prohibit “arbitrary discrimination,” which he said may include political bias, potentially ensnaring the Los Angeles Sparks and the Golden State Valkyries.
Idaho’s Wydaho Roasters ejected Students for Life of America’s local Campaign for Abortion Free Cities meeting last week, calling pro-life Americans “the same” as the Ku Klux Klan and ignoring the members’ insistence that they meet at his shop regularly.
Co-owner Jim Sheehan told Teton Valley News he asked the group not to come after they announced the meeting on Facebook, but apologized for the KKK comparison.
SFLA President Kristan Hawkins noted the strangeness of the accusation because Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger “spoke to the KKK” in her advocacy for birth control. The nonprofit organization, which is the country’s largest abortion provider, explicitly rebuked Sanger in a New York Times op-ed five years ago, noting her support for forced sterilization of “unfit” people.
Like most states, Idaho doesn’t ban discrimination on the basis of political views, but it does on the basis of religion. Pro-life views strongly correlate with church attendance, and one analysis of survey data found that people who say religion is “very important” in their lives are the most anti-abortion.
The office of Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador didn’t answer Just the News queries on the potential application of the public accommodations law to Wydaho Roasters’ practices.
The coffee shop didn’t answer when asked for the legal basis for its stated ban on customers with pro-life views, not just refusal to make products with a pro-life message.
Wydaho’s treatment of customers is “far more extreme than what Phillips did in Masterpiece Cakeshop,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said. The pro-life group is not asking the shop to “create a coffee concoction opposing abortion, like a Cafe Au Life specialty drink.”
‘He didn’t do a thing’ to get ejected after WNBA player initiated conflict
The Alliance Defending Freedom’s legal threat letter Friday to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert followed incidents involving fans who wore XX-XY Athletics gear at Indiana Fever road games to show support for the team’s sharpshooter Sophie Cunningham and her opposition to males in women’s sports. The security response has varied.
The WNBA suspended and fined Seattle Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton for verbally attacking teenage Cunningham fans, who were also holding signs thanking her, at a Fever-Storm game last month. Security didn’t ask them to hide their shirts or signs but also refused to remove Keaton for harassing them, according to local journalist Brandi Kruse.
Last week, the league and Atlanta Dream apologized for ordering fans to cover up their XX-XY shirts at a Fever-Dream game, pointedly blaming league security rather than State Farm Arena security for the decision.
A new wrinkle emerged at Sunday’s Fever game against the Chicago Sky, with the ejection of Enes Kanter Freedom – one of two former NBA players to declare for the next WNBA draft, owing to the league’s silence on the meaning of “women” – but no clear reporting on which specific authority ordered Freedom’s removal as a fan.
Sky player Natasha Cloud “began pointing and yelling” at Freedom at his courtside seat, and he “stood up and walked toward the court” as Cloud’s teammates pulled her back, CBS Sports reported. Video shows Cloud first approached Freedom, who was wearing a shirt that reads “WOMAN noun. adult human female [sic],” and he took one step on the court.
