On June 30, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Colorado Christian website designer who refused to create a website promoting same-sex weddings.
As The Epoch Times reported on Sept. 27, 2021, Lorie Smith—the owner of a Colorado-based web design company called 303 Creative—had asked the justices to overturn a decision of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. They accepted. Smith was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an Arizona-based public interest law firm specializing in First Amendment and religious freedom litigation.
In recent years, ADF has won 13 Supreme Court victories, including the Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case in 2018, which upheld the right of a Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips to uphold his religious beliefs when making custom wedding cakes.
As reported by The Epoch Times on Feb. 22, 2022, the High Court determined that its consideration of the case would be limited to one question: “Whether applying a public accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”
Lawyers for Defendant Aubrey Elenis, director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division, told the Court they shouldn’t accept the case, arguing that Smith hadn’t proven “a credible threat of enforcement” because “the record contains no evidence that anyone has asked the Company to create a website for a same-sex wedding” in the first place.
On June 30, the majority of the justices disagreed in a 6–3 vote.
On her website, Smith explains that “since filing a lawsuit” to protect her First Amendment rights in 2016, she has been “bombarded with many messages.”
“Some have been supportive, but many more have been hate-filled and deeply unsettling,” she said. Other messages have “shown that there is a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about the case.”
Rather than just believing everything people see and hear, Smith asks people to find and review “reputable sources of information about the case” in order to “make an informed judgment. She even provides a link to sourced information.
