Case Summary
Lorie Smith is a devout Christian, creative, and business owner. Her business, 303 Creative LLC, provides services such as graphic design, website design, and social media management. Lorie wishes to expand her creative services by offering wedding websites, but Colorado’s laws would force her to create websites for same-sex couples. Lorie believes that God created marriage for one man and one woman and objects to creating websites for same-sex couples that violate this biblical notion. Lorie does not object to creating websites for gay, lesbian, or bisexual customers individually, she just does not want to create same-sex wedding websites due to her religious convictions. Lorie is challenging Colorado’s laws that compel her to speak a message with which she disagrees, and now the Supreme Court will hear her case.
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Case History
Like many other creative professionals, Lorie Smith started her own business to use her design skills in keeping with her unique artistic vision. It is also important to Lorie that her creative work not conflict with her Christian faith. Lorie uses her talents in keeping with her faith by explaining on 303 Creative’s website her reasons for (1) creating speech aligned with her religious values and (2) declining to create speech that does not. But Defendants currently strip away Lorie’s freedom to do both.
Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act (“CADA”) generally bars businesses from discriminating on the basis of a person’s disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, and national origin or ancestry.
Lorie does not decide which customers to serve to create based on any of these protected characteristics, and CADA should thus have no application to her. But Lorie does refuse to say or express things contrary to her religious beliefs, including anything contrary to her conviction that marriage is a union instituted by God between one man and one woman. According to the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergerfell, which imposed same-sex marriage on the states, “This view has long been held—and continues to be held—in good faith by reasonable and sincere people here and throughout the world.”
But Defendants interpret her message-based objection to celebrating same-sex marriage as sexual orientation discrimination prohibited by CADA. This improper application of CADA puts Lorie at imminent risk of state punishment.
Defendants’ construe CADA’s ban on sexual orientation discrimination to require all businesses like 303 Creative that design, create, and publish protected expression promoting marriages between one man and one woman to nevertheless promote same-sex marriages.
This application of CADA to Lorie and 303 Creative violates the First Amendment by forcing her to express messages that she does not believe. A cardinal principle of the Free Speech Clause is that speakers have the right to control their own speech. The government cannot compel people to remain silent or speak, let alone force them to send messages about marriage they believe to be false or morally objectionable.
Yet Defendants have done just that. They apply CADA to silence Lorie’s religious speech about marriage, and force her to create custom graphics, webpages, and text that celebrate a contrary conception of marriage in violation of her faith. But the First Amendment’s very purpose is to prevent such incursions into the “sphere of intellect and spirit,” which must be free “from all official control.”
Major Milestones
- February 22, 2022: The Supreme Court granted the petition for writ of certiorari limited to the question of “whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent violates the free speech clause of the First Amendment.”
- June 1, 2022: MSLF filed its amicus brief in support of petitioner, 303 Creative.
