Kentucky lawsuit over Blaine Adamson, printer refusing to print gay pride shirts moves on

Attorneys for a Kentucky t-shirt printing company and the company’s owner, Blaine Adamson, which refused to print Pride t-shirts back in 2012, have argued that the refusal does not constitute discrimination.

A lawyer with the Alliance Defending Freedom, Jim Campbell, argued that the owners of Hands on Originals in Lexington, Kentucky, objected to printing the 2012 Lextington Pride Festival t-shirt, but that they do not discriminate against gay people.

photo chtfj21

Campbell compared printing Pride t-shirts to printing messages about illegal drug use, porn or violence.

Ed Dove, a lawyer for the Human Rights Commission in Lexington, argued that it is not possible to separate the message on the t-shirt from the discrimination.

“At what point does this message stop?… You can’t separate the message from the discrimination. That’s a red herring.”

The court also received friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Hands On Originals from The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (joined by constitutional scholar Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia Law School), The Cato Institute (joined by free-speech scholar Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law), the Sutherland Institute, and the American Center for Law and Justice.

Although Adamson declined to print the shirts because he did not want to convey the message that would be printed on them, he nevertheless offered to put the GLSO in touch with another printer that would produce the shirts. Unsatisfied, the GLSO filed a complaint with the commission despite eventually obtaining the shirts for free from another printer.

Aaron Barker, a spokesperson for the GLSO released a statement following the 2012 decision: “We’re not seeking fines or monetary damages or anything else,” he said. “In some sense, I feel like we’ve gotten what we were looking for since the Human Rights Commission has agreed with us.”