> Ms. Smith is “willing to work with all people regardless of classifications such as race, creed, sexual orientation, and gender.”
To your credit, it appears you are far from alone in missing this.
No less than a Supreme Court Justices apparently missed this fact:
"Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people. The Supreme Court of the United States declares that a particular kind of business, though open to the public, has a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. The Court does so for the first time in its history." - Justice Sotomayor
But she was never a freelance web designer. Folks just seem to gloss right over that small detail. She couldn't "refuse" because she was never actually asked.
Lower courts should have thrown it out due to lack of standing and… well… fraudulent filings to the court. That whole "perjury" thing.
The fact that SCOTUS agreed to take the case in the first place and laid down this ruling even after finding out it was purely hypothetical and lacked anything even approaching "injury" is a truly sad indictment of our justice system.
No court should make rulings based on hypothetical injuries let alone our highest one.
IANAL, but my understanding is that courts will make rulings without standing all the time. Most commonly in cases where constitutionality of a new law or statute is raised, without the law having gone into effect yet, not having affected anyone.
That’s a good point. If I was creating something out of whole cloth, I wouldn’t want to do it. However if it was required by law in order for wedding designers not to discriminate for racial or sexual orientation, I’d do it.
And the case in this situation was different where it was more like a service:
“It only insists that once Smith has designed a wedding website, she must allow same-sex couples to purchase that product. In essence, Colorado says she must sell her website template to all customers, regardless of their identity. She need not create a new template or “speak” in support of any marriage.”
What’s scary is the precedence the decision sets:
“A bakery whose owner opposed mixed-race relationships could refuse to bake wedding cakes for interracial couples; a real estate agency whose owner opposed racial integration could refuse to represent Black couples seeking to purchase a home in a predominantly white neighborhood; or a portrait studio whose proprietor opposes interracial adoption could refuse to take pictures of white parents with their Black adopted children.”
I believe the point is that she would also refuse to create a same-sex wedding site for a hetero customer and would be willing to make a hetero wedding site for a same-sex customer. It's a subtle but important distinction.
Of course, it gets very messy because in the case of wedding sites, the correlation between content and customer is 0.999999999.
But, the justification is a non-sequitur. The ruling is that the content, not the customer, was the determining factor in refusing the business, and therefore legal.
> Ms. Smith is “willing to work with all people regardless of classifications such as race, creed, sexual orientation, and gender.”
To your credit, it appears you are far from alone in missing this.
No less than a Supreme Court Justices apparently missed this fact:
"Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people. The Supreme Court of the United States declares that a particular kind of business, though open to the public, has a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. The Court does so for the first time in its history." - Justice Sotomayor
:/