After actor Michael Imperioli won major media attention with his clever dissent over the recent controversial Supreme Court decision about gay weddings and a Colorado web designer, the hypotheticals are still coming from Hollywood.
Imperioli’s “satirical and symbolic take on where blatantly discriminatory Supreme Court decisions are taking us as a nation” included forbidding “bigots and homophobes from watching ‘The Sopranos,’ ‘The White Lotus,’ ‘Goodfellas’ or any movie or TV show I’ve been in.”
Imperioli’s forbidding was made possible, in his view, because his work on those projects involved his creativity, i.e., his voice, and the Supreme Court had determined that the designer being forced to design for a gay wedding suffered an infringement on the designer’s own rights — more than she infringed on the gay couple’s right to expression.
Former Senator and comedian Al Franken joined the argument with his own hypothetical, pondering — both joking and deadly serious — a situation that bears similarities to the designer’s dilemma. Franken posits the following:
A CO woman asked me to write homophobic & anti-Semitic jokes to express her hostility to gay-marriage & Jews in general to promote her non-existent web-design business. Do I have to?
— Al Franken (@alfranken) July 5, 2023
“A CO woman,” Franken writes, “asked me to write homophobic & anti-Semitic jokes to express her hostility to gay-marriage & Jews in general to promote her non-existent web-design business. Do I have to?”
