SC To Rule On Anti-Discrimination Laws Based On Fake Case

While the Supreme Court (SC) may yet decide on 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which resembles another case that was decided a few years ago, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado, the SC should peruse the case since its main issue is hypothetical and thus cannot be the subject of judicial review, Matthew Chapman reported for Raw Story.

Photo Insert: Both cases involve a small business owner (in the latter a baker, the former a website designer), who claim that Colorado's anti-discrimination law prohibits them from exercising their faith and compels them to endorse same-sex marriage in their service.

Both cases involve a small business owner (in the latter a baker, the former a website designer), who claim that Colorado's anti-discrimination law prohibits them from exercising their faith and compels them to endorse same-sex marriage in their services, and both are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

But there's one interesting difference, noted The New Republic: in 303 Creative, the business owner, Lorie Smith, wasn't even asked to design a website for a same-sex couple in the first place, and the claim they are compelled to do so was entirely fabricated.

"Unlike the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, which at least involved real customers wanting a real cake, there is no wedding website," wrote Melissa Gira Grant.

"No person has hired Smith to create a wedding website. In fact, Smith has never designed a wedding website, according to her petition to the court. As such, there is no client Smith has told she is rejecting due to her stated religious beliefs that marriage is only allowed between one man and one woman. In the absence of all that, ADF has, instead, fashioned Smith as the victim of an injury that has never occurred."

Rather, Smith's argument is that the fear of potentially being asked to design a website for a same-sex couple has prevented her from going into the wedding website business entirely, depriving her of the free expression of doing so.

"The anti-discrimination act her suit challenges,” the ACLU argued in its brief on the case, “does not prescribe any particular message that artists — or anyone else — must express. If it did, the ACLU would challenge the law as a content-based compulsion of speech.'"

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