How Supreme Court ruling on LGBTQ wedding website impacts Tennesseans

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday in favor of a Colorado website designer and upheld that expressive speech was not subject to anti-discrimination laws — allowing some businesses to restrict services to the public based on religious beliefs.

The 6-3 decision affirmed that Lorie Smith, a website designer and owner of 303 Creative, can refuse her wedding website services to LGBTQ people based on her religious beliefs.

Smith originally filed the lawsuit after she said she got a request from a gay couple for a wedding website, despite having never designed wedding websites before, but that assertion was later dropped in her filings. Instead, the Supreme Court decision describes her worry that she might be forced by Colorado anti-discrimination laws to design a website for an LGBTQ couple, whose marriage she called "false" and said "violates God's will."

Opinion: Supreme Court 303 Creative decision distorts religious freedom. We are no longer equal.

While Tennessee does not recognize sexual orientation or gender identity under its own accommodation laws like Colorado, the decision has drawn fervent support from state religious liberty advocates, as well as concern from local LGBTQ communities.

What did the court say?

Justice Neil Gorsuch penned the decision, saying that because Smith provides design services that are “expressive” and are of her own “original, customized” creations, the product is protected under the First Amendment — therefore blocking the anti-discrimination laws from compelling her to create products that don't align with her religious beliefs.

"The wedding websites Ms. Smith seeks to create qualify as pure speech protected by the First Amendment under this Court’s precedents," Gorsuch wrote. "Ms. Smith’s websites will express and communicate ideas — namely, those that 'celebrate and promote the couple’s wedding and unique love story' and those that 'celebrat[e] and promot[e]' what Ms. Smith understands to be a marriage. Speech conveyed over the internet, like all other manner of speech, qualifies for the First Amendment’s protections."

"The First Amendment protects an individual’s right to speak his mind regardless of whether the governmentconsiders his speech sensible and well intentioned or deeply 'misguided,' and likely to cause 'anguish' or 'incalculable grief,'" he added. "Generally, too, the government may not compel a person to speak its own preferredmessages."

Justice Sonya Sotomayor penned the passionate dissent, calling the decision a slippery slope and a "threat to Balkanize the market and allow the exclusion of other groups from many services."

"How quickly we forget that opposition to interracial marriage was often because 'Almighty God' did not intend for races to mix," she said. "Yet the reason for discrimination need not even be religious, as this case arises under the Free Speech Clause. A stationer could refuse to sell a birth announcement for a disabled couple because she opposes their having a child. A large retail store could reserve its family portrait services for 'traditional' families. And so on."

Sotomayor stated that the court was "asking the wrong questions" in the case, because "the law in question targets conduct — not speech — for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment. Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group."

Tennessee religious liberty advocates celebrate ruling

The Nashville-based Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention and an organization highly active in cases like 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, praised the court’s ruling as yet another victory for religious liberty.

“The implications of this ruling extend: People are free to speak, create and operate in ways that are consistent with their deepest-held beliefs — even when those beliefs are deemed culturally unpopular,” ERLC President Brent Leatherwood said in a statement.

Amid the broader implications, Leatherwood specifically called out Colorado, saying its “scheme of compulsion and coercion against creators has failed once more.”

Under Leatherwood’s leadership, the ERLC has sought to bolster its advocacy at the state level. In states like Tennessee, where many top lawmakers and officials are conservative Christians who champion the cause of religious liberty, the ERLC’s advocacy is more collaborative compared to states like Colorado.

“If the government can compel an individual to speak a certain way or create certain things, that’s not freedom — it’s subjugation,” Leatherwood said. The ERLC regularly partners with the Alliance Defending Freedom, the law firm representing the web designer.

Concern from Tennessee LGBTQ community

Chris Sanders, the executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project, called the ruling a "chilling message" from the court.

"Tennessee's Human Rights Act does not include sexual orientation and gender identity," he said. "So today's Court ruling does not carry the same direct impact in Tennessee as it does in Colorado, but it does send a chilling message that our community can be turned away from businesses open to the public. That is disturbing in principle, but we also worry about the practical implications for LGBTQ people in small towns. If you are isolated with few businesses in your area and you get turned away, you may not have a good, close alternative. No one should have to worry about that kind of discrimination."

Molly Quinn, executive director of OUTMemphis, expressed similar sentiments.

“With this ruling, we anticipate that state lawmakers will act as though they have a license to discriminate against anyone who doesn’t fit an ill-conceived and harmful ideal, including — but not limited to — the LGBTQ+ community," she said. “We want everyone to know in Tennessee that we won’t give up."

Ruling is "narrowly tailored" says First Amendment expert

Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, acknowledged that while the decision did not sound promising to the LGBTQ community, it was narrowly tailored in a way that is unlikely to cause an effusion of discriminatory behavior.

“This has the unfortunate consequence of encouraging discrimination against millions of Americans,” he said. “So I don't think a lot of people who care about human rights are high-fiving after this decision.”

However, he explained, the decision is unlikely to change the way "99%" of businesses operate, particularly in Tennessee, which has a public accomodation law that protects people against discrimination on the basis of race, sex and religion — but not sexual orientation or gender identity.

"So that means this decision essentially means nothing in the state of Tennessee,” Paulson said.

The key to understanding the decision, he said, was remembering that the First Amendment is the right to speak, as well as the right not to speak.

"The website designer is saying that if she has to create a website for members of the gay community for a gay wedding, then the government is ordering her to engage in expressive conduct," he said. "And that is compelled speech and that violates the First Amendment."

But the ruling only applies to "expressive" businesses.

“That means that there is something about the work being done that requires creativity," Paulson said. "So 99.9% of businesses are not engaged in this sort of expressive behavior. This will not transform the face of American business. This is about that very small subset of businesses in which there is a creative process in fulfilling a request by a customer.”

The USA TODAY Network - Tennessee's coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners.

Have a story to tell? Reach Angele Latham by email at alatham@gannett.com, by phone at 931-623-9485, or follow her on Twitter at @angele_latham

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at ladams@tennessean.com or on Twitter @liamsadams.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: How Supreme Court ruling on LGBTQ wedding website impacts Tennesseans