Posted on 03/25/2026 7:50:46 AM PDT by Engraved-on-His-hands
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – To conclude a lawsuit brought by Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys, the city of Louisville has agreed to pay $800,000 in attorneys’ fees for violating the First Amendment rights of photographer and blogger Chelsey Nelson. The fee settlement comes after the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky held Louisville accountable for violating Nelson’s freedom to speak messages consistent with her religious beliefs.
ADF attorneys representing Nelson and her photography studio filed the lawsuit, Chelsey Nelson Photography v. Louisville-Jefferson County Metro Government, in 2019 because Louisville’s law threatened to compel Nelson to create photographs and blogs celebrating a message about marriage she does not believe and prohibited her from expressing her views on marriage on her studio’s website. The district court kept a permanent bar in place to prevent Louisville from enforcing its law against Nelson in this way, and the court also ordered the city to pay nominal damages to Nelson for restricting her past speech. Now, the city is paying additional attorneys’ fees.
(Excerpt) Read more at adflegal.org ...
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So she gets nothing, but the lawyers get theirs. Typical.
The Justice System is basically “just us” in one way or another. It doesn’t help regular people all that much.
taxpayer $$$ to pay lawyers, nothing for the photographer=justice???
If the city is thumbing its nose at the judge in the way that you describe, he should up the amount to $8 million
In English literature, “Let’s kill all the lawyers” is a phrase from a line of dialogue spoken by a henchman in the history play Henry VI, Part 2 (1591), by William Shakespeare.
She would have lost her case without smart and dedicated lawyers, if she could have even brought it in the first place.
> So she gets nothing, but the lawyers get theirs. <
Definition: Lawyer
A learned individual who gets you the money you deserve, then keeps it for himself.
😀
I don’t think that the intent of her lawsuit was to get money, but to keep from having to photograph same-sex weddings against her will and to keep from being sued for refusing to do so. From that standpoint, it was a win for her (and for those in similar shoes).
The lawyers are from Alliance Defending Freedom and they do a lot of pro-bono work defending religious freedom, free speech and parental rights.
The money they receive will be use to defend many others facing persecution by the woke-tard lefties running governments.
The Constitution is silent about both sexual behavior and marriage, and both have been the subject of legislation since time immemorial.
The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were intended to give blacks equal rights as citizens of the United States and segregation and miscegenation statutes should have always been deemed unconstitutional because their intended effect was to make blacks social pariahs.
There was never any language or intent to broaden these protections to sexual behavior. Under SCOTUS' "equal protection" reasoning, the court could have simply granted women the right to vote and hold public office and declared Indians US citizens without the 19th Amendment or statute. This is of course nonsense as are the court's decisions on homesoxual protections.
That doesn’t make Chelsey whole, and obviously she was billed for the work they did for her.
Chelsey would not have been billed if they lost. Also her lawsuit asked for nominal damages of $1, so that is what she was awarded.
She wasn’t seeking a payout, she was seeking to preserve her rights to free speech. Actual damages was probably to hard to prove as it involves compelled speech and she wasn’t actually prosecuted as she moved to Florida.
ADF did yeoman’s work here.
Yep.
Sounds like the judge’s sympathy lay with the state, but the case was so obvious and overwhelming there was no way to work around it.
Obergefell tilted the scales.
I'm thinking that the ones who brought the suits should be the ones brought to court and made to pay several hundred thousand like the Klein's were in Oregon for declining to create a custom cake in a state that, at the time, official defined marriage as man/woman. Instead, this city's taxpayers have to foot the bill.
Still, a good start.
I think that is too wide a paintbrush. Justices Thomas, Scalia, Roberts and Alito dissented. They didn’t sully anything. It was Kennedy, Breyer, Kagan, Ginsburg and Sotomayer who used the Constitution as toilet paper.
It was a 5-4 decision made by Democrat political officers. So it wasn’t Scotus, it was Democrats.
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