Why You Shouldn’t Need a Law Degree to Know When Your Rights Are Being Eroded
Let’s get something out of the way right now: the Supreme Court was never meant to be a celebrity panel. It’s not the Avengers. It’s not a group of benevolent sages handing down wisdom from Mount Constitution. It’s nine people in robes who hold frighteningly permanent power over the rights, freedoms, and futures of 330 million people—and, lately, they’ve been on a bit of a crusade.
You’ve probably seen a headline recently—something like “SCOTUS Sides With Religious Business Owner Over LGBTQ+ Rights” or “High Court Strikes Down Decades-Old Precedent Limiting Executive Power.” And maybe you skimmed it. Maybe you sighed and scrolled past. Maybe you thought, “Well, I’m not a wedding cake, so I guess I’m safe.”
Spoiler: you’re not.
The Legalese Translation Problem
Most Supreme Court decisions are written in a language that feels like it was deliberately designed to make your brain melt. You start reading and suddenly you’re wondering if you’ve ever understood English at all. Words like “jurisprudence,” “strict scrutiny,” “compelling interest,” and “deference to precedent” get tossed around like everyone took AP Government.
The result? You stop paying attention. Which is exactly what they want.
Let’s take a recent example from 2024: Smith v. Colorado, where a conservative majority ruled that a business owner could legally refuse to create a product (in this case, a wedding website) for a same-sex couple because it violated their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” Sound familiar? That’s because it builds on 2018’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado, only now we’ve gone from “this specific cake” to “whatever service I feel like not offering.”
And that’s not just bad news for LGBTQ+ people—it’s a slippery slope for anyone who’s ever been “othered.”
Why It Actually Affects You
Here’s what rulings like that really mean for your daily life:
- License to Discriminate: If you’re part of a marginalized group, this opens the door for businesses to pick and choose who they serve, based on personal beliefs. Today it’s a wedding website. Tomorrow it could be mental health services, a daycare, or your local pharmacist.
- Devaluation of Civil Rights Laws: These decisions slowly chip away at public accommodations protections. If “religious freedom” becomes a get-out-of-civil-rights-free card, what happens to decades of progress under the Civil Rights Act?
- Normalization of Fringe Views: The more often these rulings side with extremist ideology, the more emboldened hate groups and bigots become. It sends a cultural message that says, “Your identity is debatable.”
- Erosion of Trust: The public’s trust in the judiciary was already hanging on by a thread. Watching justices overturn decades of precedent based on personal beliefs (or political agendas) adds gasoline to that fire.
But I’m Not Gay / Brown / Trans — Does This Still Affect Me?
Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.
Because if courts start chipping away at one group’s rights today, they’ll come for yours tomorrow. Rights are not pie—more for someone else doesn’t mean less for you. But fewer rights for them absolutely means it’s open season for the rest of us.
Let me be blunt: if your rights depend on who you are or what someone else believes about you, you don’t have rights—you have privileges that can be revoked. That’s not freedom. That’s a warning sign.
The Real-World Consequences
Let’s say you’re planning a wedding. You walk into a vendor’s office and get turned away because you’re interracial, or you’re atheist, or your partner’s gender confuses the nice woman at the front desk. That’s the future these rulings make possible.
Or maybe you’re applying for healthcare, housing, education loans—and someone in power doesn’t like your pronouns, your politics, your name, your existence. That’s the fine print buried under “religious liberty” arguments.
And make no mistake: this is about control. About who gets to live freely and who has to ask for permission.
So, What Do We Do?
We resist. We pay attention. We push back—loudly.
Because they are counting on your exhaustion. They want you to feel like it’s too complicated, too big, too distant to matter. They want you to feel powerless.
But here’s the truth: the Court only has as much power as we allow them to. They don’t make laws—they interpret them. It’s our job to elect lawmakers who will codify protections for vulnerable communities. It’s our job to support grassroots legal groups, like the ACLU or Lambda Legal. It’s our job to care, even when the language is dense and the outcome feels inevitable.
Because apathy is what they’re betting on. And we can’t afford to fold.