Colorado wedding website designer Lorie Smith hadn’t even started designing wedding websites for anyone when she challenged Colorado’s non-discrimination law because she didn’t want to design wedding sites for same-sex couples.
The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against a web designer Lorie Smith, who had filed suit challenging Colorado’s statewide non-discrimination law because she didn’t want to have to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. The appellate court ruling upheld a lower court ruling.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents Smith, claimed that Colorado’s law forced Smith to violate her Christian beliefs. But the 10th Circuit Court tossed the suit, saying that the state has a compelling interest in protecting the “dignity interests” of members of marginalized groups through its non-discrimination law, according to Edge Media Network.
This is the same state nondiscrimination law that was at the heart of the Masterpiece Cakeshop lawsuit, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission acted with anti-religious bias against Masterpiece owner Jack Phillips after he refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple because of his religious beliefs. The SCOTUS ruling, however, was based on a technicality arising out of a comment made by one of the commission members and did not actually address whether a business can invoke religious objections to homosexuality in refusing services to LGBTQ people.
Interestingly enough, the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents Smith in this lawsuit, also represented Phillips in the Masterpiece Cakeshop lawsuit. It is also interesting to note Colorado’s solicitor general, Eric Olsen, had questioned whether Smith even had grounds to challenge the state’s nondiscrimination law since not only had she not been asked to create a website for a same-sex couple, she hasn’t even started making wedding websites for anyone at all.
— Tammye Nash
