Kendall Stanley: Hear ye, hear ye! Court tries to turn back time

The U.S. Supreme Court continues in its efforts to turn the nation back to the 1950s with its conservative rulings in a number of cases in the session just finished.

The one I found most confounding was the Colorado woman who didn’t want to make web sites for gay couples who were getting married, but felt thwarted under Colorado’s anti-discrimination law. The court obliged her.

Never mind the court gave her permission to discriminate. As a business open and available to the public what business is next in discriminating against some of its clients?

Rather, what captured me was that the suit was hypothetical — no gay couples had ever approached the owner, Lorie Smith, to design them a website.

Smith said as a Christian she didn’t want her words used on a gay marriage website, as she’s against same-sex marriage.

OK, fine.

But what other hypotheticals out there might the court decide it wants to rule on? In the case of Smith’s suit, where is the damage done? She wasn’t arguing that her business is suffering because of her views. Rather, her free speech rights from the Constitution were being violated because she MIGHT run afoul of Colorado’s laws.

Just watch, I’m betting there will be more of these hypothetical cases coming down the pike.

The court also ruled against race being a factor in college admissions, which was a given with the conservative bent of the court these days.

Yes, there are states, such as Michigan, that already ban using race as a criteria in college admissions. How has that worked out for them? Basically the percent of the students who are Black declined despite the efforts by colleges to maintain a diverse student population.

So colleges will have to find other ways to diversify their student body, a tricky task indeed. It won’t be easy.

One suggestion, and one Harvard was sued about shortly after the court’s race ruling, would be to eliminate legacy status to open up more slots for incoming students. Legacies are the children of alumni who get first crack at a spot in the incoming class.

It still falls to admission officials to try and get a diverse student body. Urge them the best of luck in the years ahead.

Insanity

Yes America, it’s time to recognize our country’s founding — by shooting up towns and cities across the country!

Violence was the coin of the realm over the Fourth of July holiday.

As The Guardian reported, “From the nation’s capital to Fort Worth, Texas, from Florin, California, in the west to the Bronx, New York, in the east, the Fourth of July long weekend in the US was overshadowed by 16 mass shootings in which 15 people were killed and nearly 100 injured.

“The Gun Violence Archive, an authoritative database on gun violence in America, calculated the grim tally using its definition of a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people excluding the shooter are killed or injured by firearms.

“The tragic bloodletting was recorded from 5 p.m. on Friday until 5 a.m. on Wednesday across 13 states as well as Washington, D.C. Texas and Maryland both entered the register twice.”

Suffice it to say police in all those places were in the same boat of not knowing what in heaven’s name was going on.

Keeping track of who among the populace owns some of the 400 million guns in the country and whether they might use them in a mass shooting is impossible.

There are, however, some shooters who make their intentions known — and yet people dismiss it and fail to alert law enforcement to deadly effect.

It’s horrible to realize that these days mass shootings are merely a fact of life.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Kendall Stanley: Hear ye, hear ye! Court tries to turn back time