Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) has vowed to ignore one of the Supreme Court’s recent rulings protecting freedom of speech.
The Democrat attorney general promised in a statement on Friday that he would be ignoring the high court’s ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis — which prevents the government from compelling speech.
The statement came soon after the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on the issue, which ruled that Colorado cannot require a Christian web designer to create custom wedding websites for gay couples — as this would include featuring messages that would violate her religious beliefs. The lawsuit challenged the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA), which prohibited public accommodations from restricting access to their services based on orientation and other protected categories.
In the majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch — joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — argued that “tolerance, not coercion, is our Nation’s answer.”
“The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands,” the majority opinion continued.
In her press release, Mayes claimed that the Supreme Court’s decision was “woefully misguided” — vowing that she would not enforce the ruling, and would instead continue to enforce Arizona’s public accommodation law “to its fullest extent.”
Today, a woefully misguided majority of the United States Supreme Court has decided that businesses open to the public may, in certain circumstances, discriminate against LGBTQ+ Americans.
— AZ Attorney General Kris Mayes (@AZAGMayes) June 30, 2023
“While my office is still reviewing the decision to determine its effects, I agree with Justice Sotomayor – the idea that the Constitution gives businesses the right to discriminate is ‘profoundly wrong,’” the press release read, referring to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent in the ruling.
“Despite today’s ruling, Arizona law prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation, including discrimination because of sexual orientation and gender identity,” the press release continued.
Mayes went on to tell Arizona residents that “they should file a complaint with my office” if they believe “they have been the victim of discrimination” in any “place of public accommodation.”
This isn’t the only law that Mayes refuses to enforce, as she announced during an interview with Capitol Media Services last week that she would not be prosecuting doctors who perform abortions. While Arizona technically bans abortion after 15 weeks of gestation following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the state’s Democrat Gov. Katie Hobbs has stripped all authority for prosecuting abortion-related crimes from county attorneys and instead gave the authority to her radical far-left attorney general.
