Inside the Supreme Court Case Involving a Wedding Website Designer
The latest wedding-related case to hit the Supreme Court involves a Colorado website designer and her refusal to complete work for same-sex couples. The case, 303 Creative LLC vs. Elenis, covers a range of topics, including discrimination, creative content restrictions, religion, free speech, and the First Amendment.
The owner of 303 Creative, Lorie Smith, sued Colorado as she starts a new wedding-related service as part of her work as a web designer. For religious reasons, however, Smith wants to limit this service to heterosexual couples. "Attorneys for 303 Creative (including the same attorney, Kristen Waggoneer, who represented the baker in Masterpiece Cakeshop) have argued that the website creator is a creative and that what she does is a form of speech," elaborates Lois J. Liberman, partner at Blank Rome in New York. "To require [Lorie Smith] to provide her creative content, which she argues is a form of speech, 'would violate her beliefs about what scripture holds on marriage.'"
[...]
"Their argument is the Court should follow a rule that says: if the speech is being created and there's an objection–and that objection is contained in the message–it is protected speech and the government can't interfere," says Liberman. The ruling, ultimately, will trickle down to both couples and vendors. Below, we review recent Supreme Court cases related to weddings and the significance of the latest.
A Recent History of Wedding-Related Supreme Court Cases
Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015
"The most high-profile wedding-related Supreme Court case would be the Obergefell v. Hodges case, which ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution," says Liberman. "The ruling requires all 50 states, the District of Columbia, etc. to perform and recognize the marriages of same-sex couples on the same terms and conditions as the marriages of opposite-sex couples, with all the accompanying rights and responsibilities."
Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 2018
An adjacent example, says Liberman, was another Colorado-based Supreme Court case between the state and a cake baker. The courts ruled in favor of the business owner Jack Phillips, who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex couple due to religious reasons in the state.
"The ruling was more about religious freedom than gay marriage," explains Liberman. "In fact, in that decision, there were stated concerns that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted in a hostile fashion towards the baker. Judge Kennedy wrote, 'At the same time the religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances protected forms of expression…The commission's hostility was inconsistent with the First Amendment's guarantee that our laws be applied in a manner that is neutral toward religion.'"
303 Creative LLC vs. Elenis, 2022
Argued on December 5, the case is under extreme scrutiny given Roe v. Wade. "On a serious note: if the outcome is a ruling for 303 Creative, there will be a belief this is a sign of more conservative rulings to come," says Liberman. "If you look to the fact that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, combined with the comments made by Justice Thomas about the implications the ruling could have on the legal justification for Obergefell, then there is concern that more freedoms (a woman's reproductive freedom was taken away) are at risk."
To read the full article, please click here.
"Inside the Supreme Court Case Involving a Wedding Website Designer," by Esther Lee was published in The Knot on December 9, 2022.