The decision in 303 Creative deals a blow to the anti-Discrimination law
First Amendment Appeals to the Colorado Supreme Court in a Civil Rights, Equality and Sexually Inclusive Web Design (The Case of Stewart and Mike)
The First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees.
It is unclear whether any specific couple will have to rethink their wedding plans after this. As reported yesterday by The New Republic, Smith filed a suit after getting a request for services from a couple named Stewart and Mike, but Stewart said he had already married a woman and never actually asked for it. The Supreme Court is very conservative and they wanted to protect faith-based discrimination in Masterpiece Cakeshop.
There has been a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for sexual minorities. reactionary exclusion has been met with new inclusion forms. This is heartbreaking. It is also familiar. Some public establishments refused to allow the civil rights and women’s rights movements equality in public life. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims.”
This year, the new conservative supermajority reached out in an aggressive manner, agreeing to decide a discrimination case that had never before been filed.
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.
I have two moms, one a musician, the other a professor and ordained minister. The three of us spent every summer of my early childhood at my grandparents’ house in rural New York, where my musician 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 angry. Is it possible that they don’t want us to be here? She remembers what she was thinking. “It was very much a sense of invasion.” I remember feeling frightened. We never went back to the cafe again.
Last fall, for my first major assignment in law school, I wrote a mock brief for the respondent’s side in 303 Creative, defending the Anti-Discrimination Act as if I were the attorney representing Colorado. I did not think the project would bring up family memories, but I did think it would feel personal.
The website design lawsuit filed by Jack Stewart, a U.S. supreme court martial judge, and a gay couple’s cake
He added that he was a designer and “could design my own website if I need to” — and was concerned no one had checked into the validity of the request cited by Smith until recently.
Smith named Stewart — and included a website service request from him, listing his phone number and email address in 2017 court documents. But Stewart told The Associated Press he never submitted the request and didn’t know his name was invoked in the lawsuit until he was contacted this week by a reporter from The New Republic, which first reported his denial.
She thinks it might have been a troll making the request, something she has seen with other clients. In August of last year JackPhillips won a partial U.S. Supreme court victory after he refused to make a gay couple’s wedding cake because of his Christian faith.
“The request was received, that’s what it’s undisputed,” he said. “That wasn’t a genuine request, or it was someone who was looking for that, so it’s irrelevant to the case.”
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Friday called the lawsuit a “made up case” because Smith wasn’t offering wedding website services when the suit was filed.
Weiser didn’t know the specifics of Stewart’s denial, but said the nation’s high court should not have addressed the lawsuit’s merits “without any basis in reality.”
About a month after the case was filed in federal court challenging an anti-discrimination law in Colorado, lawyers for the state said Smith had not been harmed by the law as they moved to dismiss the case.
Her lawyers did not believe Smith had to be punished for violating the law. They said in February of last year that even though she did not need a request, she had received one.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/01/1185632827/web-designer-supreme-court-gay-couples
The Colorado Wedding Websites Victims: Lore Stewart vs. Stewart, and a Call from a Man Apparently Never asked to Work with Lore
They said that it’s not true thatLorie will not create a custom website for same-sex weddings, because she’s received a request.
“I was incredibly surprised given the fact that I’ve been happily married to a woman for the last 15 years,” said Stewart, who declined to give his last name for fear of harassment and threats. His contact information, but not his last name, were listed in court documents.
The revelation distracts from Smith’s victory at a time when she might have been basking in her win, which is widely considered a setback for gay rights.
The lawsuit was filed seven years ago by a designer of wedding websites, who was angry at a person she thought wasStewart, who had requested that she take down her website. When lawyers for the state of Colorado pressed her on whether she had sufficient grounds to argue, her attorneys referred to it.
A Colorado designer who refused to create a wedding website for same-sex couples cited a request from a man who said he never asked to work with her.
