The Supreme Court upheld a web designer who wanted to discriminate against gay clients
The Supreme Court Rules that a Graphic Designer Can’t Craft a Website for Marriages of a (Pseudo) Gay Couple
The Supreme Court has ruled that a graphic designer can’t be required to make a website celebrating the wedding of a (possibly hypothetical) gay couple, saying it would violate First Amendment protections against compelled speech. It’s a decision that isn’t necessarily surprising for the current court but one that could intersect strangely with the coming fight over online moderation.
Smith who believes that marriage should only be between a man and a woman, said she wanted to create a custom web-page business for weddings, but could not do so because under Colorado law she would have been forced to create websites that violate her faith. Colorado did not want to dictate what Smith said in her designs, but if she is open to the public, it has to serve everyone.
The court has now endorsed that argument, holding that the First Amendment exempts 303 Creative from Colorado’s requirement because the company offers “expressive” and “customized” services. This is the first time that the court has granted a business a right to refuse to serve members of a protected class, as noted in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent. This free-speech exemption applies to civil rights laws across the country. It potentially allows a wide range of businesses to discriminate in the name of expression.
This year, the new conservative supermajority reached out in an unprecedented way, agreeing to decide a case in which nobody had filed a claim of discrimination.
On Friday, the court ruled against the state and for the web designer in a decision that could have profound consequences in Colorado and 29 other states that have laws requiring businesses open to the public to serve everyone, regardless or race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.
The two moms that I have are a professor and an ordination minister. My family spent every summer in NY at my grandparents house, where my mom ran a music festival. One day she walked into a local cafe to find a sign bearing an antigay slogan: Homosexuals will burn in hell, we remember it saying. The cafe, it turned out, was owned by the Twelve Tribes, a fundamentalist group known for teaching that gay people deserve to die. After seeing the sign, my mom was deeply shaken. My other mom was outraged. “Who are they to say we can’t be here?” She remembers thinking. A sense of invasion was what it was. I remember feeling scared. We didn’t go back to that cafe.
Last fall, I was given my first major assignment in law school, where I wrote a mock brief for the other team in the Anti-Discrimination Act case. I thought the project might feel personal, but I didn’t expect it to bring up buried family memories.
