Supreme Court takes up wedding site designer’s case refusing gay couples

The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to review a dispute involving a Colorado wedding website designer’s refusal to make her services available for same-sex weddings.

Although the designer’s anti-gay marriage stance is based on religious belief, the justices limited the case only to the free-speech implications of the Colorado law at issue, not the issue of religious liberty.  

The case arose when artist Lorie Smith’s plan to include a disclaimer on her website explaining she would only design sites for heterosexual weddings ran headlong into the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act. 

That law restricts the ability of a “public accommodation” to turn away customers based on their identity, including sexual orientation, or even communicate an intent to offer unequal treatment on this basis. The law defines a public accommodation as a business that serves the public and is not principally used for religious purposes. 

Before Smith posted her disclaimer, she filed a preemptive lawsuit challenging the law over concerns that her message would otherwise run afoul of the nondiscrimination law.     

Smith’s proposed message read, in part, that due to her religious convictions, “I will not be able to create websites for same-sex marriages or any other marriage that is not between one man and one woman. Doing that would compromise my Christian witness and tell a story about marriage that contradicts God’s true story of marriage — the very story He is calling me to promote.”

A federal district court ruled against Smith. A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld the lower court ruling, concluding that the First Amendment did not protect Smith’s plan to deny services or publish her intention to do so, prompting Smith’s appeal to the Supreme Court.

Argument in the case, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, is expected next term.

Updated at 12:13 p.m.