FRIDAY WAS A BIG DAY for the U.S. Supreme Court. Aside from its highly watched student loan decision, it decided a gay website case. It was a set up, of course. It wasn’t about serving a gay person (or couple) a meal at a restaurant or allowing them to stay in a hotel room. It wasn’t even about decorating a generic wedding cake for a couple of this protected class. It was about speech.
Lorie Smith, a Christian graphic designer of websites, believes marriage should be between a man and a woman. Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws required her to do her designs, including creating art and writing for same-sex weddings, if she wanted to work in her field at all. The Alliance Defending Freedom represented her in a case before the Court which asked, “Can the government compel an artist to create custom artwork or speech that goes against the core of who that artist is?”SCOTUS said no, 6-3, and ruled that Colorado could not force Smith to create art that offended her religious beliefs.
“The First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch, holding for the majority. The usual suspects dissented: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
ADF C.E.O. Kristen Waggoner said in a statement:
“Disagreement isn’t discrimination, and the government can’t mislabel speech as discrimination to censor it. Lorie works with everyone, including clients who identify as LGBT. As the court highlighted, her decisions to create speech always turn on what message is requested, never on who requests it. The ruling makes clear that nondiscrimination laws remain firmly in place, and that the government has never needed to compel speech to ensure access to goods and services.”
Many in the liberal press or MSM didn’t quite grok the decision, of course, claiming it somehow discriminated against LGBTQ persons rather than celebrated the First Amendment right of free speech, we all, LGBTQ and ‘cis-gen,’ enjoy. The decision in the case, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, is here.
Why would any LGBTQ person seriously hire someone like Smith, anyway? Wouldn’t you rather have someone in simpatico design your website? It was a set-up for litigation. No one was actually harmed. They were just making a point in a far-reaching agenda.
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