Colorado wedding website designer can refuse gay customers, U.S. Supreme Court rules

The First Amendment allows a Colorado graphic designer to refuse to make wedding websites for same-sex couples, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday in a decision that could have a sweeping nationwide impact.

A split high court ruled for Littleton graphic artist Lorie Smith, who said her Christian faith prevents her from creating wedding websites for same-sex couples. Smith, who runs the business 303 Creative, wanted to offer wedding websites solely for straight couples.

She challenged Colorado’s public accommodation law, which says that if she offers wedding websites to the public, she must provide them to all customers. Businesses that violate the law can be fined, among other penalties. Most states have such laws.

Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the justices’ 5-3 decision.

“The First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees,” he wrote.

The majority of justices agreed with Smith’s attorneys, who argued that the public accommodation law violates her free speech rights by forcing her to create messages that go against her faith.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and other opponents contended that allowing businesses to pick and choose who to serve under a free speech claim opens the door to widespread discrimination against many groups of people.

“The principle that we are fighting for is that if you are a public business, you have to serve everybody, and you can’t engage in the practice that we’ve seen in our history: ‘No Jews allowed,’ ‘No Blacks allowed,’ etc.,” Weiser said in a news conference after the case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in December.

Smith’s case, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, is the second high-profile challenge to Colorado’s public accommodation law to pit religious beliefs against gay rights in recent years.

In 2018, baker Jack Phillips won a partial victory at the U.S. Supreme Court after he refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple in 2012. Phillips has since refused to make a transgender transition cake; he was sued and most recently lost an appeal to the Colorado Court of Appeals, which upheld the state’s public accommodation law.

The narrow decision in Phillips’ 2018 U.S. Supreme Court case set up a return of the issue to the high court, and legal observers expected a much broader ruling with wider implications in the 303 Creative case.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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