A federal judge is set to decide whether to grant a motion for a preliminary injunction requested by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) on behalf of the Queen of Angels Catholic Bookstore in Jacksonville.
Arguments on the motion for preliminary injunction in Queen of Angels v. Jacksonville happened last week on Monday, May 15 before Judge Tim Corrigan.
“What's at stake is free speech,” said ADF attorney Hal Frampton. “Free speech is for everyone. No business owner should be in fear of government enforcement simply for what they say about their religious beliefs on their store's website.”
At the core of the litigation filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida is a city of Jacksonville law requiring businesses to use pronouns that reflect customers’ professed gender identity, which could potentially result in Christie DeTrude, who owns Queen of Angels Bookstore, paying unlimited fines and damages.
“We simply want an injunction that says the bookstore is allowed to publish its policy on not using non-biological pronouns and explain the theological underpinnings of that policy,” Frampton told the Florida Record.
The law also penalizes businesses for posting statements someone could see as unwelcoming, such as explaining the belief that God creates people male or female and that only women can give birth to children.
“What surprises me, in particular, is the breadth of the unwelcome clause, which is a little clause at the end of Section 406.201 that prohibits a place of public accommodation from publishing anything that someone might later interpret as making them feel unwelcome or objectionable or unacceptable based on a protected characteristic because the vagueness and subjectivity of that language appear to prohibit a wide swath of constitutionally protected speech," Frampton said in an interview.
Opposing counsel representing the City of Jacksonville argued that the lawsuit is a pre-enforcement case and that plaintiffs are required to wait until a complaint is filed against the bookstore in order to litigate the constitutional claim.
“We think that's incorrect,” Frampton said. “We think the Supreme Court has been very clear that pre-enforcement litigation is constitutionally permissible, and that Americans don't have to wait until the government is literally enforcing the law against them to vindicate their constitutional rights.”
Another problem is that people can take offense to nearly anything and decide that it makes them feel unwelcome, according to Frampton.
"We represent a bookstore that serves everybody," he added. "They're happy to have everybody come in and talk with them about the faith and buy their products, but they want to use their website to promote Catholic teaching and that it's not within God's design for people to adopt a gender identity dissonant with their biological sex."