Feels like another big one
Here’s an eye-catching headline: Man cited in Supreme Court LGBTQ rights case says he was never involved.
In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of Lorie Smith, a Colorado web designer who objected to building a wedding web site for a gay couple … that did not exist.
Wait, what?!
Lorie Smith filed her initial case to Colorado district court in 2016, arguing that the state’s anti-discrimination law prevented her from including a message on the webpage for her company, 303 Creative, stating that she would not create wedding websites for gay couples.
In subsequent court documents, her lawyers cited a query that they said was sent by an individual named Stewart with contact information that matches the person The Post interviewed. The request asked for Smith’s services for Stewart’s forthcoming wedding to a person named “Mike.”
“We are getting married early next year and would love some design work done for our invites, placenames etc. We might also stretch to a website,” the message cited in the case read.
A New Republic reporter contacted Stewart last week prior to the ruling. It was the first time Stewart had heard anything about the case (New Republic):
Yes, that was his name, phone number, email address, and website on the inquiry form. But he never sent this form, he said, and at the time it was sent, he was married to a woman. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart explained. (Stewart’s last name is not included in the filing, so we will be referring to him by his first name throughout this story.)
“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he continued, sounding a bit puzzled but good-natured about the whole thing. “I’m married, I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”
What’s more, it was the first time anyone had contacted him about the case.
The revelation of a falsified request may not matter much in a strictly legal sense, said Jenny Pizer, the chief legal officer at Lambda Legal, a group that protects LGBTQ+ rights. The court has signaled recently that potential liability is enough to support a legal challenge, she said.
“The bigger impact might well be on the public’s view of the claims by self-identified Christian business owners who claim they are victims of religious persecution when they are expected to follow the same non-discrimination laws that apply equally to all business owners,” she said. “This sort of revelation tends to reinforce to many people that the fundamentalist Christian victim narrative is without foundation.”
The inquiry from Stewart seems to have appeared at a suspicious point in the litigation, the New Republic noted.
The query was sent on 21 September 2016, a day after the Alliance Defending Freedom filed the lawsuit on Smith’s behalf. In the fall of 2016, Smith’s attorneys originally said that she did not need an actual request for services to challenge the law. But months later, in February of 2017, it referenced the request. Smith signed an affidavit saying she received the message.
The Alliance Defending Freedom tells the Washington Post, “Whether Lorie received a legitimate request or whether someone lied to her is irrelevant. No one should have to wait to be punished by the government to challenge an unjust law.”
Harry Litman, former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General, tweeted:
This is a bonafide scandal. On the legal level, it means the Court decided a case that wasn’t a real case or controversy as Art III requires. On the political level, it
means that conservative forces in the country have effected a huge change in the law, and inroad on long-established anti-discrimination principles, based on a contrived story that exploited the judicial system and simply did an end-around the requirement of actual facts.
Finally, for the Court majority it’s a huge black eye that they neverthelss will simply ignore, b/c they can, and b/c the case serves their agenda,even though they sh be apoplectic about being taken advantage of. Imagine the hue & cry if Jane Roe had been a man who made it all up
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his opinion that “the First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands.”
“All manner of speech – from ‘pictures, films, paintings, drawings, and engravings,’ to ‘oral utterance and the printed word’ – qualify for the First Amendment’s protections; no less can hold true when it comes to speech like Ms. Smith’s conveyed over the Internet,” Gorsuch wrote.
Educators in Ron DeSantis’ Florida and in other states restricting speech and books can taste the bitterness.
Maybe not having an actual request ultimately is irrelevant to this case. But it still raises quite a stink. The fact that teams of Trump supporters after November 2020 submitted slates of fraudulent electors from multiple states seems pretty damned relevant. But what do I know? Law is outside my area.
Conservative activists deploy “voter fraud” as an accusation like Donald Trump does with “Russia, Russia, Russia.” Is it any surprise where the real fraud is coming from?