Posted on 12/20/2023 5:55:08 AM PST by Bon of Babble
A federal judge ordered the city of East Lansing to pay $825,000 for violating an apple farmer’s right to free speech and freedom of religion because of his opposition to same-sex marriage.
(Excerpt) Read more at mlive.com ...
Good time to be a lawyer in East Lansing, not a bad payout.
“Charlotte farmer Steve Tennes, owner of Country Mill Farms, can return to selling his produce at East Lansing farmers’ markets after being banned by the city for conservative views he has expressed regarding same-sex marriage.”
Feel Good story of the Day!
The bad part someone will come after him again and again, this law fare will not stop just because he won this case.
Can’t read the story without signing in.
Excellent. It’s sad that the taxpayers have to foot the bill. Maybe they’ll think before they vote next time.
Really? I am able to go straight to it without having to sign in.
> Good time to be a lawyer in East Lansing, not a bad payout. <
Old joke: A lawyer is a learned individual who gets you the money you deserve, then keeps it for himself.
Definitely not the end of it.
Yes. Just ask Masterpiece Bakery in Colorado, the lefties kept coming after him even after a SCOTUS win:
“2018: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who had refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple.”
Fast forward to 2021:
“A Colorado Baker Is Fined For Refusing To Make A Cake For A Transgender Woman...the ruling, ordered him to pay a $500 fine. The maximum fine for each violation of Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act is $500.”
The farmer should put a lien on all city property if the lawsuit award is not paid promptly.
The maddening part is that nothing he expressed had any actionable effect on any queers at all. Not that that would matter.
It was SOLELY his “unapproved” speech that was punished.
He wasn’t awarded enough.
It’s going to take going after people as individuals for violation of civil rights under color of law, to slow this stuff down. Unfortunately that is very expensive and there may not be resources for a payout even if you win.
East Lansing is where MSU is. It is infested with woke snowflakes
Take the money, sell the farm and move to a red state.
Not really. The attorney fees are set by how many hours are spent on the case. In all likelihood, if the farmer lost the case, the attorney would not see a dime or at most pennies on the dollar.
25 yrs ago, I was an attorney in a very small practice (4 attorneys) that split costs. Our take home was what we earned minus overhead. My cost-what it took to run the office with no salary to me, was $2500 a month. If I had a paralegal, my cost would have been $7500 a month. I could not afford to take on a case like this, because I could not spend the hours on a possible payoff. A lot of good cases never go to court because the plaintiff has no money and the lawyer cannot take the risk of no money at the end. Another way of putting it, those fees that the farmer's lawyer made is offset by the cases the lawyer lost. I knew an attorney that took these high risk cases. He made good money on his regular cases, which allowed him to take high risk cases. He told me that when he factored in the number of cases that he lost against those that he won, he was working for less than his regular hourly rate even though he charged a much higher hourly rate for these cases. Why did he take these cases? Because they were interesting.
A lot of attorney work is dull and requires a high level of detail. Every document, especially the boiler plate, has to read and applied to the situation at hand. If you don't like stress, writing and focusing on minutiae, don't become an attorney. I didn't, so I left as soon as I could.
Think before they vote? Your’re dreaming. Dazed and confused and stupid is just the way most go through life. that part of the bell curve is huge and growing.
Should have requested “judgement in prejudice”.
In the so-called “LGBT” arena, the Left proved expert at turning a political cause, in all its forms, into government action promoting the cause. They have conflated legally earned rights to their own “free expression” into making the government an agent in promoting their causes.
Can you imagine smokers, gamblers or others managing to conflate their rights into MAKING the government promote their activies? No.
Those two sentences, the excerpt and OP’s first post, constitute the entirety of the article. The picture description on the site is as long as the ‘story’...
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