Supreme Court Considers Case of Christian Website Designer Targeted Because She Won’t Promote Same-Sex Weddings
A Christian website designer in Colorado ought to be able to turn down same-sex weddings because her commercial service is also protected free speech, her lawyer told the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday.
Some members of the court’s conservative majority seemed sympathetic to that argument during oral argument, seeing a distinction between unlawful discrimination and lawful speech.
“So the question isn’t ‘Who,’ it’s ‘What,’” Justice Neil Gorsuch said at one point.
But Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson peppered the website designer’s lawyer with hypothetical scenarios designed to show that turning down a same-sex couple seeking to celebrate a wedding is akin to rejecting customers because of their race, religion or disability.
The difference, the website designer’s lawyer said, is that artists produce content that amounts to speech, and they should not be compelled to create speech they disagree with.
“It is their work. It might also be the customer’s, and the customer can use that. But the First Amendment is broad enough to cover the lesbian website designer and the Catholic calligrapher. The line is that no one on any side of any debate has to be compelled to express a message that violates their core convictions, because as this court found, it’s demeaning to them,” said Kristen Waggoner, a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing Smith.
A lawyer for the state argued that Colorado’s law rightly protects various classes of people against discrimination, including same-sex couples.
“The company claims that because it wants to sell websites, the law somehow targets expression, and therefore violates the First Amendment. But because Colorado law targets the commercial conduct of discriminatory sales, its effect on expression is at most incidental,” said Eric Olson, Colorado’s solicitor general.
