Sotomayor warns LGBTQ wedding website case could open door to racial discrimination
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In her biting dissent Friday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that the Supreme Court’s decision to protect a Christian wedding website designer’s right to refuse services to LGBTQ+ couples could open the door for discrimination against other protected minority groups.
“A website designer could equally refuse to create a wedding website for an interracial couple, for example,” Sotomayor wrote in the dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“How quickly we forget that opposition to interracial marriage was often because ‘Almighty God . . . did not intend for the races to mix,'” she said, quoting Loving v. Virginia, the 1976 landmark case that overturned state-level bans on interracial marriage.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Friday in favor of Lorie Smith, an evangelical Christian owner of the website design company 303 Creative LLC. Smith argued that Colorado would force her to design wedding websites for same-sex couples under its public accommodation law, despite her faith-based opposition to same-sex marriage.
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The high court decided that Smith can refuse to endorse messages with which she does not agree, due to constitutional free speech protections.
Arguing that the case could affect other protected minority groups, Sotomayor posited that a stationer could refuse to sell a birth announcement for a disabled couple because she opposes their having a child, or a retail store could refuse family portrait services for families that are not “traditional.”
Sotomayor also rebuffed the assertion that Smith would accommodate business from LGBTQ+ couples — so long as it wasn’t for wedding websites.
“Apparently, a gay or lesbian couple might buy a wedding website for their straight friends,” Sotomayor wrote. “This logic would be amusing if it were not so embarrassing.”
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