Michael Imperioli, best known for playing Tony Soprano’s troublesome nephew Chris in The Sopranos, is insisting that a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court “allows” him to discriminate and ban “bigots and homophobes” from watching his screen performances.
The ill-informed actor was incensed by last week’s decision by the high court rebuking the state of Colorado for forcing a Christian to make a wedding website for a gay couple.
“I’ve decided to forbid bigots and homophobes from watching ‘The Sopranos,’ ‘The White Lotus,’ ‘Goodfellas’ or any movie or TV show I’ve been in,” Imperioli wrote in a July 1 Instagram post. “Thank you Supreme Court for allowing me to discriminate and exclude those who I don’t agree with and am opposed to. USA! USA!”
The case, 303 Creative v. Elenis et al., was decided by a 6-3 majority, with all of the court’s Republican appointees siding with the website designer and the three Democrat appointees in opposition.
The court’s decision ruled that the State of Colorado cannot force a website designer to create messages that support same-sex marriages against her religious beliefs, citing the woman’s rights under the First Amendment.
Clearly, Imperioli didn’t bother to read the Court’s decision and went off on his rant without even knowing that the opinion even made note of how the law actually implicated his own profession of acting and filmmaking.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that ruling against the Christian in this case would set the stage for governments to force filmmakers to produce movies with messages that violate their own consciences:
[T]he First Amendment protects an individual’s right to speak his mind regardless of whether the government considers his speech sensible and well intentioned or deeply “misguided,” … and likely to cause “anguish” or “incalculable grief.” … Equally, the First Amendment protects acts of expressive association. …Generally, too, the government may not compel a person to speak its own preferred messages. …Nor does it matter whether the government seeks to compel a person to speak its message when he would prefer to remain silent or to force an individual to include other ideas with his own speech that he would prefer not to include. … All that offends the First Amendment just the same.
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Consider what a contrary approach would mean. Under Colorado’s logic, the government may compel anyone who speaks for pay on a given topic to accept all commissions on that same topic—no matter the underlying message—if the topic somehow implicates a customer’s statutorily protected trait.
Taken seriously, that principle would allow the government to force all manner of artists, speechwriters, and others whose services involve speech to speak what they do not believe on pain of penalty. The government could require “an unwilling Muslim movie director to make a film with a Zionist message,” or “an atheist muralist to accept a commission celebrating Evangelical zeal,” so long as they would make films or murals for other members of the public with different messages. …Equally, the government could force a male website designer married to another man to design websites for an organization that advocates against same-sex marriage.
Regardless, Imperioli does not personally own the distribution rights to HBO shows such as The Sopranos and could not conceivably enforce the new standard he has set for the show’s fans.
Breitbart’s John Nolte wrote a 20-year retrospective on The Sopranos, declaring that series creator David Chase “showed the world what television was truly capable of. His mold is now the norm, what we expect. At the time, we had never seen anything like it, and therefore it is not hyperbole to argue The Sopranos is to television what Rock Around the Clock was to music.”
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