US Supreme Court rules website designer can refuse to serve same-sex couples
bbc.comBad 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.
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.
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.
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
:/
She refuses to offer the same website creation services for gay couples. So she is not willing to work with anyone on their websites.
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?
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Theological squabbling over doctrine isn't really the point here.
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.
Par for the course with Sotomayor.
It seems like that could be used to justify all sorts of questionable refusals?
She had every right to refuse business to anyone for any reason as a business owner, regardless of the quality of her reasoning. People also have the right to refuse to use her business and go to a competitor who would likely be happy to service them.
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.
If you operate a retail store, should you be able to refuse business to someone in a wheelchair, especially if building the ADA ramp will cost you an extra 10k that you don't want to spend?
Not according to laws passed by congress.
We don’t have a free market and you definitely don’t have the right to refuse business with anyone for any reason.
If you word it right you can. Just make incredibly complex and vague agreements that people must agree to to do business with you. Like Amazon, who can terminate your business with them after falsely claiming you’re a racist.
That is the opposite of any reason. That is a specific reason.
It’s a “specific” reason in that it’s specifically fictional, yet qualifies for that protection.
If buyers found that Amazon was structurally refusing members of a protected class they could be sued.
Nobody thinks Amazon is purposefully refusing business with protected classes.
I generally hold this opinion, also, but I worry about the ramifications. Should we allow restaurants to exclude certain races? What if employees of the business differ on their treatment of customers? It feels like opportunity for much more chaos, even if the free market handles it.
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.
I agree that there are problems, specifically when an ideology dominates an industry in a given locale. For single employee behavior, a company should have a code of conduct or expectation of some degree of professionalism because they are representing the company. If a single employee treats someone poorly, the business can be called out and hung out to dry. It is the business’s responsibility to hire and maintain employees that accurately represent their business.
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.
But no one asked her to. That part was completely made up. She didn't really even have a web design business.
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-gay-rights-lgbtq-we...
I'm just waiting for someone to argue that it violates their religion to allow black people to sit at the lunch counter and suddenly we're back to the 1960s
It seems like there's a distinction between things here, though. As far as I can tell, no precedent has been set here regarding an individual's right to receive non-speech-based goods or services.
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.
I figure if cake can be protected speech surely a ham on rye with a side of fries can be.
Wasn't the whole cake thing that they wanted custom writing on top? As in, a plain old cake would be fine, but a cake that said "Congratulations on your wedding!" would be speech, as far as I read it.
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.
Not for the cake shop in Colorado. The couple just came in and said "we want a wedding cake for our gay wedding" and the owner refused with no other details about the cake discussed. I do however see there have been lawsuits where the writing on cake was at issue (including one in the UK where the request was to write "Support gay marriage") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
> Wasn't the whole cake thing that they wanted custom writing on top?
I’m fairly certain it was, it was a wedding cake after all. However people love to drop details and make it worse.
Not in this case anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
There were other lawsuits, such as a case in Ireland that involved writing though
> I’m fairly certain it was
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.
Unfortunately no. I think the problem is there wasn’t one single case, and its been so long I can’t remember specifics to the cases I did hear.
>> 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
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?
I thought the same but the case mentioned down below in the replies brings up an interesting point. The Colorado cake bakery case involved a regular cake, no special decorations on it. Seems we may be going down a slippery slope again.
I don't quite understand the Colorado bakery case, but it seems like it involves a custom cake and the majority opinion was very narrow, intentionally not addressing the broader intersection of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and anti-discrimination. This website designer case seems to fill that legal gray zone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
It's not unprecedented. In the history of the US, the Bible has been used to justify owning slaves and segregation.
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.
Something similar happened in Sweden:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45207086Farah 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.Forcing employees to handshake is maybe the most bizarre company policy I've ever seen. I've known multiple people who were uncomfortable with handshaking. I imagine that if this company didn't get in trouble for discriminating against someone because of their religion which prohibited getting touchy touchy with members of the opposite sex, that they would have run into trouble eventually for discriminating against someone with OCD.
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.
A lot of restaurants already dislike black patrons, they consider them to be stereotypically "bad patrons". So, I think this will happen much sooner than we'd hope.
Technically, isn't the ruling that the website designer can refuse to create same-sex wedding content? If the same-sex couple commissioned a website for a hetero wedding, the designer would be obligated, right?
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.
> If the same-sex couple commissioned a website for a hetero wedding, the designer would be obligated, right?
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.
Yes, I guess that's what I meant, but wasn't precise enough. Thanks for the correction.
I’d love a complete breakdown on how this case even made it to the Supreme Court. From my (very limited) understanding the situation in this case is essentially a hypothetical?
The court took it cause they felt like it. Full stop. Standing, harm, prior precedence, it all just goes out the window when there is a 6/3 majority.
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.
I'm not sure why states are not just ignoring federal courts at this point. The GOP hasn't allowed democrats to appoint any judges (even when they had majorities in the senate) for over a decade now. There is no reason for blue states to abide at all at this point, and they should just defer to their own state level courts instead. Either that or a 'supreme court in exile' needs to be made to counter this.
From there it's a slippery slope to not even maintaining a facade of following the Constitution. I don't know if any system can really be "perfect" in balancing different moralities, or having a reasonable recovery mechanism to address what are considered intolerable injustices. I think this was all a matter of time in the grand scheme of things.
> From there it's a slippery slope to not even maintaining a facade of following the Constitution.
SCOTUS is already there. The GOP is also pretty much there.
I'm not sure if the SCOTUS is quite there yet but I get what you mean. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. What a time to live in.
> The GOP hasn't allowed democrats to appoint any judges (even when they had majorities in the senate) for over a decade now.
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.)
You are confusing things here. One liberal supreme court justice (with none of the others being picked by the incumbent administration and instead decided by McConnell and co.) does not make up for the hundreds that have aged/died out of office since the clinton and obama years.
Is it overtly a hypothetical? My understanding is that the "customer" in the case may have been fabricated.
https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-...
It was fabricated. He has no idea what's going on. He's also not gay. He's married to a woman.
100% designed to bring this issue to the supreme court, that’s all.
Especially after two lower courts sided with Colorado already.
It seems like the plaintiff's lawyer lied - the person they "denied" a website for was a straight married guy who never interacted with the business owner.
I think there's a pretty clear line with this sort of thing that we'll eventually settle around.
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.
I’m surprised they took the case. It seems like a carbon copy of the cake decorator case that set this precedent.
> 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)
You misunderstand the baker case. All that case ruled was that the Colorado Civil Rights Commision was harassing Masterpiece Cakeshop, and that they needed to stop. It's why as soon as the case was over, the baker was sued again by someone else.
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
In the cake case, they ended up not really ruling on the issue and focusing on the specific treatment of the baker by the commission rather than the broader rights concerns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
From the majority: "The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands."
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.
Both the majority and the dissent "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.
It wasn’t even a real case - no one asked the designer to create anything
There were no customers, it’s all just hypothetical
well if we are this far then can it be a precedent to disallow the website itself from serving LGBT folks? what about Muslims?
You, personally, can discriminate against anyone for any reason. The laws kick in once you're a non-trivial business.
what about Muslims?
What about them? Do muslims need to be forced to sell/serve non-halal items in their establishments?
If their establishments are open to the public, generally yes, in my opinion, within reason. And that's okay: if an entity wants to operate a business open to the public, it should be open to all the public (within reason: obviously they can't be compelled to be "open" to customers for which there is no relevant business relationship to be had). So an establishment selling only halal goods couldn't be compelled to sell non-halal goods, but it also ought not be permitted to refuse service to non-muslims.
> If their establishments are open to the public, generally yes [we need to force Muslims to sell non-halal food], in my opinion, within reason.
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.
A more apt comparison, would be telling a muslim vendor they can refuse to sell their halal items to christians.
I think your proposed comparison follows the headline, and the headline doesn't actually reflect the ruling.
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.
This doesn't make sense. Why would a Muslim vendor care to do that in the first place? There is nothing in their religion that says only Muslims can eat halal food. It's a completely different scenario.
> Do muslims need to be forced to sell/serve non-halal items in their establishment?
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.
> 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.
Decisions like this seem like tricky business, and probably doesn't help that most news about things gets filtered through two or three layers of news media first.
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.
That's the clear goal, yes.
The "stay humble be kind" is a bit over the top tbh.
Waaaait, isn't this the same court which considers money to be speech?! By the same rationale, a bank cannot be forced to "speak" with you after you "speak" with it....
If you're getting the "money=speech" information from the Citizens United ruling, then you fell into the same trap I did by reading the headlines. Despite what all the headlines said, Citizens United didn't actually rule that money is speech.
Money = speech regardless of where you are. Because money means influence, and that means you have minimal consequences for your actions.
Why was this flagged?
I think if they are going to allow discrimination for "religious" reasons, then I think then the whole issue is gone to dust. I should be able to discriminate against your religion then as well, because I am not religious.
You can. That’s the point.
The headline is wrong and this is a free speech case, not a religious case, specifically the question of "whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment."
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.
I believe that "not religious" is considered a religious belief. I'm pretty sure that "religious" beliefs can even include things like not wanting to take a vaccine (according to some courts).