f you would like a sticker for your business to show your support of Human Pay please fill in this quick form and a sticker will be mailed to your place of business.
The Big Picture:
A small—yet vocal and well-funded—sliver of our country continues to seek to refuse service to the LGBTQ+ community, hiding their bigotry behind the thinnest veil of constitutionality and manufactured loopholes in the First Amendment.
Why this hurts:
As a queer, intersectional organization, these attacks on our right to exist are not theoretical. They are visceral. They are aimed at us. And they hurt.
A fuller context:
First cakes and websites—and now a hair salon in Michigan, for heaven's sake—are suddenly front-and-forward in our minds and in our news feeds. Intellectually, we recognize these as the desperate death-throes of bigotry. Emotionally, however, these are acts of terror, designed to make us feel less than, to make us doubt the hearts and minds of our neighbors.
In the wake of the 303 Creative ruling, Glenda Russell wrote, “Beware of telling yourself ghost stories about the decision. It's bad. It's not the end of the world. Positive change happens, and then there are backlashes. Backlashes feel bad. They come because some people don't like the progress we as a community have been making.”
As acts of terror, they are designed to seed doubt. They are designed to sow fear. They are designed to make us “shut up.” Mechanically, of course, there is no shortage of queer-friendly hairdressers, designers, and bakers. These spaces were possibly chosen (with intent by those who architect this sort of grotesqueness) because of their significant queer representation. These fights were manufactured to make us doubt ourselves.
But they aren’t real.
The Masterpiece Cake Shop decision, decided on a technicality rather than substance, opened the door for weaponizing the First Amendment. 303 Creative followed with a less favorable outcome. Jean Dubofsky, member of Out Boulder County’s Advocacy and Public Policy Committee and first woman to become a Colorado Supreme Court Justice, writes:
“Based on stipulated facts, the Supreme Court ruled that the designer’s speech was creative expression and that she could not be compelled under the state’s public accommodations law to design a website for a gay wedding. However misguided, this is a narrow decision with limited impact. As the lawyer for Lambda Legal noted, ‘few commercial services involve original artwork and pure speech offered for commissions.’”
The fact that no gay couple ever asked 303 Creative to produce a website has both little to do with anything and everything to do with everything. Manufactured fights against unreal foes cause very real pain. It cuts even deeper that the case was decided without hearing from actual humans who will be impacted.
And now we hear rumblings of a hair salon in Michigan flexing their transphobic muscles…
An actionable response:
But we saw this coming and were prepared. Beyond the radically resilient community we are so proudly part of, our Advocacy and Public Policy Committee began working on an initiative to offset that fear with actionable joy.
You will begin seeing pink stickers popping up on windows and websites of Boulder County businesses in the coming weeks. This is our Human Pay initiative, designed as a mid-level activist campaign geared toward everyday business owners who recognize that every human who walks through their door is a valued customer and will be treated as such.
Watch the Human Pay feature on 9News here and read the Longmont Leader article here.
Get Human Pay materials for your business
If you would like a sticker for your business to show your support of Human Pay please fill in this quick form and a sticker will be mailed to your place of business.
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