Washington
CNN
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The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of a Colorado Christian web designer who refuses to create websites to perform same-sex weddings over religious objections will have a far-reaching impact on other minority groups and could open the door to a large number of research cases. to further reduce civil rights protections in the US.
In a 6-3 opinion issued Friday by Justice Neil Gorsuch joined by the court’s five other conservatives, the justices said First Amendment free speech protections allowed web designer Lorie Smith, refusing to expand its same-sex services. weddings
The ruling was rooted in free speech concerns and could create a massive hole in state public accommodation laws for companies that sell so-called “expressive” goods, allowing companies that offer personalized and expressive products and services to choose and choose who they work with. .
Legal experts told CNN that the ruling by the conservative majority is likely to cause confusion about which companies fit the description provided by the opinion, stressing that members of the LGBTQ community are not the only ones affected by the sentence
“I don’t think the court was clear at all. I think he invented categories that don’t exist in commerce. The idea of ’personalized’ or ‘expressive’ services are not categories,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a University of Texas law professor and expert on public accommodation laws.
“So I think the category of companies that will be able to claim free speech against anti-discrimination laws is not at all clear. But it’s not small,” Sepper added. “There will be a relatively large range of companies that can claim the right to free speech against anti-discrimination laws.”
Experts also cautioned that the decision in 303 Creative v. Elenis is just the opening chapter in what will likely be years of litigation by people seeking to push the boundaries around state and local laws that provide civil rights protections to various minority groups.
Jennifer Pizer, the legal director of Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ rights group, also said the court was unclear about what types of businesses fall under the category the court mentioned.
“I think the problem is the very wide range of goods and services in society that involve a certain amount of customization, a certain amount of creativity,” Pizer said.
“Today’s decision does not condone discrimination against anyone and everyone who uses a little creativity, talent, skill to create a custom product,” he added. “Today’s decision addresses one thing in particular and describes this as involving extensive engagement with the client to create a unique work that involves the designer’s artistic expression.”
The vast majority of Americans live in an area where state or local public accommodation laws exist. As of this month, 22 states, the US Virgin Islands and Washington, D.C., had laws on their books that explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that advocates for LGBTQ rights, while five other states interpret “existing prohibitions on sexual discrimination to include sexual orientation and/or gender identity.”
Confusion over the scope and meaning of Friday’s ruling may be similar to the legal wrangling that followed last year’s landmark gun rights case. In that case, the conservative majority changed the test courts must use when analyzing the constitutionality of firearms regulations, opening the floodgates for all kinds of gun safety laws guns can be challenged in federal court.
For example, the justices agreed Friday to review next term a federal law that prohibits a person subject to a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a firearm, a law that a lower court reconsidered in light of the decision of the Supreme Court last year on the Second Amendment. Box.
All three liberal members of the Supreme Court dissented from Friday’s ruling, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing that the majority gave companies a “new license to discriminate.”
He suggested that the “logic of the decision cannot be limited to discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity,” and wrote that it “threatens to balkanize the market and allow other groups to be excluded from many services.”
Gorsuch pushed back in a footnote, writing, “Our decision today is not about, let alone endorsing, anything like the ‘heterosexual couples only’ warning that the dissent conjures up out of thin air.” .
But legal experts believed that Sotomayor was not crying wolf in her dissent, as the opinion could open up other minority groups to the same kind of behavior for which Smith sought approval.
“The concern is that this gives a green light to any employer to refuse service to anyone on the basis of their identity, whether gay or lesbian or Jewish or black or whatever, because they have an objection to that kind of people who are in their business,” said Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School.
“There was nothing in the opinion that limited it to objections to same-sex marriage,” Franke added.
Similarly, Sepper said the majority did not specifically limit the decision to LGBTQ people. He said that in other court cases in this area, there has been language about race, for example, being different.
“We don’t see that here at 303 Creative. So that opens the door to discrimination based on race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, any kind of discrimination,” he said.
Meanwhile, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement Friday that the decision promises to “destabilize the public marketplace” by allowing all types of businesses to have “a First Amendment right to reject customers for who they are.”
The court’s decision in 303 Creative represented a notable departure from other major LGBTQ rights cases it has decided in recent years.
In 2020, Gorsuch scored a massive victory for the LGBTQ community when he delivered the majority opinion in a case that extended federal protections to gay, lesbian, and transgender workers. And in 2015, the court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, a hard-fought victory for community members.
But in the wake of Friday’s decision, LGBTQ advocates and experts warned that, far from resolving the issue at the heart of the case, the ruling will likely embolden opponents of LGBTQ rights and spur a new wave of litigation that could erode protections of civil rights. in other areas of life.
“There is nothing in this opinion that limits it to just website design cases, and the rules articulated by the court today could easily be extended to the entire range of businesses as well. Whether it’s employment, housing, any kind of business, and these cases will be next,” Franke said.
Pizer doubled down on that point, saying the decision “is blowing another hole in civil rights laws and is likely to be taken as a message that justifies much more discrimination.”
“I think the big problem here, and it has been and continues to be a big problem, is that these kinds of cases don’t solve the problem,” he said. “It invites a lot more litigation to determine where the boundaries might be.”
