Our fave legal expert Neal Katyal suspects it won’t remain unchallenged for long.
It’s been a busy week or so for the Supreme Court. One of its more confusing cases concerning LGBTQ rights is drawing backlash from public figures — but our fave legal expert Neal Katyal suspects it won’t remain unchallenged for long. Here’s the deal.
A website designer didn’t want to make wedding sites for gay couples
The court ruled in favor of Lori Smith, an evangelical Christian web designer from Colorado who doesn’t want to create wedding websites for same-sex couples. Smith contested that as a creative professional, she shouldn’t be forced to write messages that she doesn’t believe in.
The 6-3 majority was decided on free speech grounds. This means that under the First Amendment, Smith has the right to refuse to endorse messages she disagrees with — and won’t be punished under Colorado’s antidiscrimination law for doing so.
What’s the catch?
It emerged at the 11th hour that no gay couple had actually asked Smith to create a wedding website for them. As Neal explains, this means Colorado can go to the Supreme Court with a petition for a rehearing, and say that new evidence has emerged that this is a fake case. “I suspect Colorado will do that, and I suspect the Supreme Court will throw out the decision,” he says.
Why are some conservatives comparing the case to Roe v Wade?
Conservatives are making the argument that Roe vs Wade was also a fake case, because Roe wasn’t pregnant at the time of the decision. Crucially however — as Neal points out — Roe had been pregnant! This makes her situation very different to that of the website designer who’d never designed a website for an LGBTQ couple, nor had a request to design such a website.
In Roe, the court said she was pregnant when she filed the case, the ordinary period of human gestation is about 280 days, if we had to insist that she was pregnant when the case came to the Supreme Court, no case could ever get to the supreme court, because you couldn’t race it through the court in time. So they’re very different factual circumstances.
Neal gets into so much more detail on all this, plus the other major decisions to come out of the high court last week, below.
