US Supreme Court rules website designer can refuse to serve same-sex couples
bbc.com
bbc.com
The court ruled that creating a website was considered speech. The government cannot force you to produce speech you are against.
The state stipulated (agreed with) the following:
> Ms. Smith is “willing to work with all people regardless of classifications such as race, creed, sexual orientation, and gender,” and she “will gladly create custom graphics and websites” for clients of any sexual orientation.
> She will not produce content that “contradicts biblical truth” regardless of who orders it.
This would also protect a Muslim artist from being forced to produce a drawing of Muhammad if requested by a client.
> Ms. Smith is “willing to work with all people regardless of classifications such as race, creed, sexual orientation, and gender.”
To your credit, it appears you are far from alone in missing this.
No less than a Supreme Court Justices apparently missed this fact:
"Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people. The Supreme Court of the United States declares that a particular kind of business, though open to the public, has a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. The Court does so for the first time in its history." - Justice Sotomayor
:/
Of course, it gets very messy because in the case of wedding sites, the correlation between content and customer is 0.999999999.
She will make straight websites for gay customers. And she won't make gay websites for straight customers.
It is the content of the request, not the sexual orientation of the requester.
If you were a freelance developer, would there be projects that you would be morally opposed to working on?
And the case in this situation was different where it was more like a service: “It only insists that once Smith has designed a wedding website, she must allow same-sex couples to purchase that product. In essence, Colorado says she must sell her website template to all customers, regardless of their identity. She need not create a new template or “speak” in support of any marriage.”
What’s scary is the precedence the decision sets:
“A bakery whose owner opposed mixed-race relationships could refuse to bake wedding cakes for interracial couples; a real estate agency whose owner opposed racial integration could refuse to represent Black couples seeking to purchase a home in a predominantly white neighborhood; or a portrait studio whose proprietor opposes interracial adoption could refuse to take pictures of white parents with their Black adopted children.”
Lower courts should have thrown it out due to lack of standing and… well… fraudulent filings to the court. That whole "perjury" thing.
The fact that SCOTUS agreed to take the case in the first place and laid down this ruling even after finding out it was purely hypothetical and lacked anything even approaching "injury" is a truly sad indictment of our justice system.
No court should make rulings based on hypothetical injuries let alone our highest one.
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-gay-rights-lgbtq-we...
IANAL, but my understanding is that courts will make rulings without standing all the time. Most commonly in cases where constitutionality of a new law or statute is raised, without the law having gone into effect yet, not having affected anyone.
She and her lawyer made up a hypothetical scenario, submitted it as a legal injury to the court, and the SCOTUS ruled on it anyway.
Seriously, that lawyer deserves to be disbarred for knowingly filing false info.
Perhaps if she was asked to make a website called www.thebibleisfake.com you might have a case for infringement of speech.
Is a distinction like that even relevant? I don't think the US court system is going to wade into determining who is correctly practicing their religion or not. That itself would be a glaring First Amendment violation.
I think there is a difference here. It is not a prohibition in Christianity to create a website for a same sex couple, whereas producing an image of Muhammad is a prohibition in Islam.
I'd also argue that a wedding website for same-sex couples is not something that "contradicts biblical truth"; there is plenty of homosexuality in the bible.
But religion =/= holy text.
This was purely hypothetical if she were to enter the wedding website creation business and a gay couple were to ask her to create a site for them and she declined and if she were to get in trouble with the Colorado government because of it?
And Colorado argued that she would not get in trouble and only have to sell the same site templates she already made for hetero-couples to same-sex couples, not make new products for them? [1]
And the counter argument was that each theoretical website would be completely unique[2] but this whole situation seems weird and not like one the court should have even heard (yet) because it never happened?
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/12/303-creative-gay...
[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-476_c185.pdf [PDF p.22 / Opinion p.16]
The free market goes both ways and while first amendment protects you from state prosecution of exercising free speech, it does not protect you, however, from the court of public opinion, which she and her business may need to answer to.
The lines between what individuals can do and what a business can do (with individuals representing it) feel too blurred. In cases like the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses after Obergefell, she _has_ to because of the office she represents. It feels like businesses should have the same obligation, because business !== person.
In the case of Kentucky county clerk, that person failed at their position as a public servant to perform the duty they were assigned. If it goes against their personal beliefs, that is not the job for them and they can reenter the job market for a position they are capable of performing.
I don’t agree that business should have the same obligations as public institutions, but they must also be willing face indefensible criticism if they choose to die on this hill. Social issues tend to always be progressing on the whole in some way, and I would be in favor of government subsidized grants for small business owners who are willing to create a competing business in an otherwise monopolistic environment.
It’s easy to suggest that we should just legislate away undesirable behavior, but this does not solve the underlying problems and will simply be gamed as most laws lacking teeth or clear violation criteria are. It’s only when social pressures force a business either to rethink their stance or to close will you get meaningful results.
Nobody thinks Amazon is purposefully refusing business with protected classes.
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-gay-rights-lgbtq-we...
It's a common strategy. Figure out the conclusion you want to draw first, and then look in the Bible for things that justify your viewpoint, glossing over things that don't support or contradict your point of view or shine a bad light on your subsequent behavior.
For instance, if you go into a burger shack and the owner doesn't like some trait about you, they still have an obligation to sell you the same burgers they'd sell anyone else. If they have a special bun where they write out in sesame seeds "I endorse your decisions" for some people, though, then they'd be under no obligation to give you that specific bun.
It's a good point regardless, though, and I don't envy the position of trying to draw the line between what's protected speech and what's not.
Edit: it seems the cake was not requesting custom writing -- custom writing was explicitly protected as free speech in another case. It seems in the analogy of the burger joint, that case was more akin to a burger joint which only sold "I endorse your decisions" buns. Which makes me as glad as ever that I'm not in charge of being the arbiter of what's speech and what's not.
I’m fairly certain it was, it was a wedding cake after all. However people love to drop details and make it worse.
There were other lawsuits, such as a case in Ireland that involved writing though
Do you have a citation for that? I've also seen reporting that there wasn't an actual couple, and to be honest: I'm having trouble figuring out what's real here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
Isn't that only true if the trait they don't like is related to a protected class? Couldn't they refuse to sell burgers to left-handed people, for instance?
Farah Alhajeh, 24, was applying for a job as an interpreter when she declined to shake the hand of a male interviewer for religious reasons.
She placed her hand over her heart in greeting instead.
The Swedish labour court ruled the company had discriminated against her and ordered it to pay 40,000 kronor ($4,350; £3,420) in compensation.
I'd give them a pass if being an interpreter actually required you to touch strangers as a function of the job, but give me break.
It's a subtle distinction, but legally important.
Things get really messy because it's tough to disentangle the content from those commissioning the website in the case of a same-sex wedding.
Don't get me wrong: I hold these web designers in low regard. However, my understanding is that this ruling isn't as bad as the headline suggests.
Based on this ruling, no. The designer would be just as firmly within their rights under this ruling to say "I don't think anyone should get married, so I won't do a heterosexual wedding website", or to say "I think this person is too tall, so I don't want to make their website".
If the designer agreed to make a given website, though, then declined upon finding out that the customers were a same-sex couple (in a way that didn't change the contract at all), then that would still presumably be a case of discrimination.
The Supreme Court is explicitly political, partisan organization, which should have been obvious after bush v gore but now this is here to remind a new generation what a joke this thing is.
In case anyone was curious, literally the most recent appointment to the Supreme Court was by (Democratic president) Joe Biden. Ketanji Brown Jackson began her service exactly one year ago.
(Biden has also appointed over a hundred other federal judges.)
SCOTUS is already there. The GOP is also pretty much there.
https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-...
Let me start with the hypothetical illustration. Michaelangelo was a devout catholic. If a Muslim sultan had captured him and forced him to create works of art that offended his personal values, do we really believe that he would have been capable of producing his best works of art, or even items of the same caliber as those he regularly created? Of course not. He would have created art for sure, but without the spark that comes from his passion, there is no physical force in existence that could have prodded him to paint his best masterpieces.
So then neither should a court force a modern day expression of artistic creation when it goes against the personal values of the creator.
Most of these cases boil down to someone wanting work involving a not insubstantial amount of creativity by a craftsman who holds opposing viewpoints. Even if we force them to do so at gunpoint, they won't create at the same standards because it will be intrinsically impossible to coerce creativity. Should we then punish them for that? Of course not.
Now on the other extreme, I don't think there's any real principled disagreement that can be had by forbidding McDonalds from discriminating who can buy a cheeseburger. It's a mass produced item, devoid of creativity at the point of production. What I mean is that all the creativity has already happened at the corporate office and we see merely the works of distributed assembly. There's no discernable difference between a McChicken assembled under coercion and one by incentive.
Of course there's a murky line in there, but insofar as a work involves creativity, it ought not be compelled.
For example: a wedding cake bakery. Mixing the dough and baking it is not a creative act - it's a well practiced procedure sourced previous creative endeavors that don't need repeating. A bakery serving the public ought not to be able to refuse an undecorated, baked rectangular cake to anyone if its part of a product regularly produced. Beyond that, you start to get into exercising creativity with frosting, however simple and I think you should not be compelled to exercise your creativity.
> But the Supreme Court now says artists cannot be compelled to express messages against their religious beliefs.
How is this conclusion different from the conclusion they reached in the cake decorator case?
(Also in CO if I’m not mistaken)
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
From a dissenting opinion: "Today, the court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class."
Remember, the job of the Supreme Court is not to decide what is morally correct or just, but to interpret the Constitution.
The difference is that the majority want to interpret it in a way that agrees with their morality, while the minority interpret it in a way that agrees with theirs. The actual text of the Constitution itself has no bearing on it; it can be used to justify any decision they want.
So the majority opinion becomes the Constitution. They'd like for you to believe that it flows inevitably from the 1787 text, but that's simply not the case. The opposite opinion could just as easily have been "the interpretation", aside from the accident of history that made one group the majority and the other not.
There were no customers, it’s all just hypothetical
What about them? Do muslims need to be forced to sell/serve non-halal items in their establishments?
No and that is a mischaracterization of the decision. This case states that they can decide who they want to sell their items to and discriminate against those they feel are unworthy of their goods.
It absolutely does not.
I believe that the ruling is focused on the content, not the client. My reading is that if the same-sex couple had (for some odd reason) asked for a hetero wedding site, the web designer would not have been allowed to deny them business.
Either GP's question got reversed after they posted, or you misread their post, or your phrasing is off. The rest of your post suggests that Muslims should not be compelled to sell non-halal items.
It's definitely a tough situation overall, and there's no totally satisfying result (which is the sign of a good case for the courts, as far as I'm concerned).
As a constrasting example, in many states, political affiliation is a protected class. If a swastika-tattooed neo-Nazi asked for a portrait, would an artist be obliged to do the painting, even if no endorsement of the ideology was requested? As distant a case as that is, it seems like the legal principles being argued here carry over more-or-less directly.
The idea is that the government can't compel someone to endorse a particular message. This includes the commission of creative works that someone disagrees with. This is NOT a general right to refuse service based on protected characteristics.
So you can't make a Jewish baker bake holocaust cakes if they don't want to (yes, this is an actual example that came up). But if someone is already selling holocaust cakes, they have to sell them to everyone regardless of race or sexuality.