Buttigieg calls Supreme Court ‘out of step’ with Americans on LGBTQ issues

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Sunday called the Supreme Court “out of step” with Americans over an opinion that sided with a Christian wedding website designer who rejected providing services for same-sex couples.

“As I’m getting ready to go back to my husband and our twins for the rest of this morning, I’m thinking about the fact that the existence of our family is only a reality because of a one vote margin on the Supreme Court a few years ago,” Buttigieg told CBS’s Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation. “These are the kinds of things that are at stake and we have a Supreme Court that is very much out of step with how most Americans view these issues.”

Buttigieg, who is openly gay, blasted the court’s decision Friday that ruled that Colorado cannot require an evangelical Christian web designer to provide same-sex wedding websites. He also said that cases like these are used to get people riled about LGBTQ issues, adding that it diminishes the “equality” of same-sex couples.

“I think what’s really revealing is that there’s no evidence that this web designer was ever even approached by a same sex couple looking for services to support their wedding,” he said. “So you’re seeing more and more of these cases in these circumstances that are designed to get people spun up and designed to chip away at rights.”

The court ruled that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law violates the web designer’s free speech rights under the First Amendment by demanding she create same-sex wedding websites if she wants to also do so for opposite-sex unions. Buttigieg also questioned whether the U.S. has already seen the “high watermark of freedoms and rights in this country.”

“Because up until now, not uniformly, but overall, each generation was able to say that it enjoyed greater inclusion, greater equality, and more rights and freedoms than the generation before and those decisions have added up and affected so many people,” he said.

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