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Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

Bad headline is bad.

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.

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And yet this never actually happened, right?

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]

It's probably a fake case anyxay: https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-...

> This would also protect a Muslim artist from being forced to produce a drawing of Muhammad if requested by a client.

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.

Believe it or not, websites are not a major subject in the Bible.

But religion =/= holy text.

LGBT is a protected class, just like race. The desire to have Muhammad drawn isn’t protected in anyway, so it’s not at all equivalent.

Did you completely miss the part

> 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

Par for the course with Sotomayor.

She refuses to offer the same website creation services for gay couples. So she is not willing to work with anyone on their websites.

I believe the point is that she would also refuse to create a same-sex wedding site for a hetero customer and would be willing to make a hetero wedding site for a same-sex customer. It's a subtle but important distinction.

Of course, it gets very messy because in the case of wedding sites, the correlation between content and customer is 0.999999999.

You mistake the product for the customer.

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?

I would never discriminate my output based on race, religion or orientation.

What if someone asked you to do a website for a Christian group that wanted to ban homosexuality?

That’s a good point. If I was creating something out of whole cloth, I wouldn’t want to do it. However if it was required by law in order for wedding designers not to discriminate for racial or sexual orientation, I’d do it.

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.”

But she was never a freelance web designer. Folks just seem to gloss right over that small detail. She couldn't "refuse" because she was never actually asked.

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...

> thrown it out due to lack of standing

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.

No new law or statute was raised.

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.

Building a wedding website for same-sex couples is not a prohibition in Christianity. In fact, it's closer to a tenet of the faith than a prohibition.

Perhaps if she was asked to make a website called www.thebibleisfake.com you might have a case for infringement of speech.

But, the justification is a non-sequitur. The ruling is that the content, not the customer, was the determining factor in refusing the business, and therefore legal.

Theological squabbling over doctrine isn't really the point here.

What you're saying is nonsense. How is the desire to have something drawn for you all that different from the desire to have a website created for you? It's essentially the same.

Because producing an image of Muhammad is an explicit prohibition in Islam. Providing services to same-sex couples is not a prohibition in Christianity.

> Because producing an image of Muhammad is an explicit prohibition in Islam. Providing services to same-sex couples is not a prohibition in Christianity.

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.

We Muslims cannot draw or make statues of any prophet or messenger as well, and anything with a soul as well.

It seems like that could be used to justify all sorts of questionable refusals?

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