Hey, folks, it's a Sunday. That means it's time to jump into the Ben Shapiro Show mailbag.

You actually have to be a subscriber over at DailyWirePlus.com in order to have your question answered in the mailbag. Sherry says, I've heard the trans community referred to as a protected people. What does that mean? I think one of the justices of the Supreme Court, Justice Katanji Brown Jackson or Justice Sonia Sotomayor, maybe referred to them that way in a recent ruling. Well, that'd be so toor. She wrote today, the court for the first time in its history grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. Well, what protected class means is it's a legal definition. So presumably, she means here that in Colorado, anti-discrimination law covers classes of people. You are not allowed to discriminate against people on the basis of race. You can't... So race is a category. It's a protected class. You're not allowed to do it on the base of sex. Sex is a protected class. In Colorado, it says sexual orientation. The sexual orientation is a protected class. So being gay or being lesbian or being a bisexual is now a protected class. That's what it means. Now, the real

question there in that particular case is whether the protected class was being discriminated

against or whether it was the activity of the protected class that was being discriminated

against. So, for example, it is perfectly within your rights to say at your restaurant, no one is

allowed to play rap music at this restaurant. Is that attacking black people?

Not really.

So the question in this particular case in 303 creative is what it was called was whether

if a gay couple comes in and demands that you do something for their gay wedding,

is that the same thing as a gay couple coming in and just ordering a cake or ordering a pizza

or something?

And the answer, as the court says, is no. There's a difference in the activity and between the actual protected class. Now, if it were up to me, I'm not a fan of anti-discrimination law generally. I think it violates freedom of association. I think it's constitutionally questionable on its face. I think the idea that the government has the capacity to force you into some sort of a personal or business relationship with somebody you don't want to be involved with, I think that's wrong. With all of its downsides, and I'm not going to pretend there are no downsides to that. Racism is wrong. Also, I don't think the government has the capacity to force you to stop saying the N-word. The N-word is wrong and bad, and people shouldn't say it.

And also, the government has no capacity to punish you for doing so. I feel the same thing about freedom of association. Tray says, hey, Ben, long-time listener, love your willingness to ask hard questions and then analyze them. If given the chance to moderate a presidential debate, whether that be for the Republican primaries or for the major candidates for the general election, would you accept the opportunity? Also, what questions would you ask of the candidates either as a whole or individually?

I definitely think seriously about it. As far as what I would ask of the candidates, you know, as a whole, I would ask, you know, what are your three, your three top priorities for preventing the

infiltration of federal government bureaucratic

institutions by the left. Sort of the deep state question. How do you plan on to it? So when I ask

questions individually, that's mostly how it'd be tailored. So for example, I'd be asking Donald

Trump a couple of questions. One, you're the frontrunner right now. You say that you got the last election stolen from you. How do you plan to prevent this next time? What are your active plans? What are the active things you are doing to stop that from happening if, as you say, the election was stolen? Because I don't know that Trump has an answer to that. The other question I'd ask is, what is your specific proposal for ridding the federal

government of the people who are existing inside bureaucratic institutions who are oriented

against you, to harm you? How do you plan to actually prevent the things that happened last time

from happening again if you become president of the United States again? The question for

Ronda Santis would be, what do you think is the proper role of federal governmental power in regulating life, as opposed to state power? In other words, when it comes to drag queen story hour, is that something that you're going to try to ban on a federal level or is that something that needs to be left up to the state-by-state basis? I think it's an interesting question because he's used state power in, I think, constitutional ways at the state of Florida level, but he starts to get into some more dicey areas when you're talking about the federal

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