Prof. William Wagner recently represented members of the Colorado legislature in support of Christian baker repeatedly facing government sanction for exercising sincerely held religious conscience. We just learned that the Colorado Supreme Court rejected the latest attack against this Christian man.
The First Amendment embodies an ideal that is uniquely American—that true liberty exists only where men and women are free to hold and express conflicting political and religious viewpoints. Under this aegis, the government must not interfere with its citizens living out and expressing their freedoms but embrace the security and liberty only a pluralistic society affords.
Ubiquitous special preferences for sexual orientation and gender identity (hereinafter SOGI), imposed by states in the name of protecting freedom, too often unnecessarily threaten fundamental First Amendment liberties. These government actions unavoidably require religious people to relinquish their right to artistic expression inhering in their personal religious identity.
Government SOGI preferences, enforced via censured and compelled speech regulation, too often unconstitutionally collide with the expression protected by the First Amendment. State enforcement of speech directives advancing such preferences frequently weaponize State action to eliminate the First Amendment as an important constitutional constraint on the exercise of State authority. Indeed, religious people in our nation face a far more onerous predicament than the drafters and ratifiers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights could ever have imagined.
The beacon of liberty fails to shine when freedom dies on the pulpit of the civil authority’s demands to supplant its will and opinion of morality for that of its citizens. The promise of liberty amounts to nothing more than empty subterfuge when the State punishes its citizens for expressing their thoughts and views inhering in their personal identity. Persecution of religious identity via compelled speech imposed by the State upon Christian people must not stand in the United States. The First Amendment, designed to protect free expression and religious tolerance, requires rebuke of oppressive and overreaching government action. While the Court here avoided reaching this truth, the case against Jack was so bad the court ruled for Jack. To God be all the glory!
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