It turns out that the next such case, which the Supreme Court takes up Monday, was just a short drive away.
About five miles from Jack Phillips’s Masterpiece Cakeshop, the focus of the battle four years ago, is a cheerful office in a nondescript building. Graphic designer Lorie Smith says the same Colorado public accommodation law that Phillips challenged, which forbids discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, also violates her deeply held religious views and free-speech rights.
Smith wants to expand her business to create wedding websites but only to tell the stories of brides and grooms “through God’s lens.” And she wants to be able to tell same-sex couples on her 303 Creative LLC website that she will not create such platforms for them.
“Colorado is censoring and compelling my speech and really forcing me to pour my creativity into creating messages that violate my convictions,” Smith said in a recent interview, with one of her lawyers sitting nearby. “There are some messages I cannot create.”
Two courts have ruled against Smith, saying Colorado has a compelling interest to require that businesses that are open to the public serve all of the state’s citizens.
No matter how authentic Smith’s broad free-speech argument may be, state Attorney General Philip J. Weiser (D) told the Supreme Court in his brief, it would encompass not only a business’s religious beliefs “but also objections motivated by ignorance, whim, bigotry, caprice, and more — including pure expressions of racial, sexist, or anti-religious hatred.”
When the court took Smith’s case, it declined to hear Smith’s claim that Colorado’s law violates her religious freedom. Nor did it agree to hear her request to overturn Supreme Court precedent on neutral laws that might have implications for religious believers.
Instead, the justices propose to answer this question: “Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”
And some court observers say that decision could have even more impact.
Smith is represented by the same conservative legal organization that defended Phillips. Her case has been years in the making. But it arrives at a moment of discordancy over the LGBTQ rights movement.
Nationally, Congress is on the verge of providing landmark federal recognition of same-sex marriage, a step unthinkable even a decade ago. But the effort is motivated significantly by fear that the Supreme Court might one day renege on the constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry that it found in 2015.
In Colorado, residents last year saw their history-making governor, Jared Polis, marry first gentleman Marlon Reis in an intimate ceremony still grand enough to merit high society coverage. But last month, the LGBTQ community, and the nation, was shocked when a gunman who stormed a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, shooting dozens of patrons and killing five.
Some wonder how the state has come to play such a prominent role in the Supreme Court’s consideration of whether same-sex marriage will be treated differently from traditional marriage.
The Colorado legislature never approved same-sex marriage; instead, it was decreed by federal courts. But far earlier, by 2008, the state had outlawed discrimination against gay people in housing, public accommodation and employment, and it established civil rights protections on the basis of gender identity.
“It…
Read More: Colorado’s 303 Creative Supreme Court case pits LGBTQ rights vs. free-speech
