Gorsuch rebukes Sotomayor for saying his ruling gives LGBT people ‘second-class status’
Kaelan Deese
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After the Supreme Court ruled Colorado cannot compel a web designer to create messages that run against her sincere Christian beliefs, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented and said the majority reduced LGBT people to “second-class status.”
“By issuing this new license to discriminate in a case brought by a company that seeks to deny same-sex couples the full and equal enjoyment of its services, the immediate, symbolic effect of the decision is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status,” Sotomayor wrote, chiding conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch‘s 6-3 majority opinion in 303 Creative v. Elenis.
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The decision on Friday held that Colorado’s public accommodation or anti-discrimination law would violate plaintiff Lorie Smith’s First Amendment rights and applies also to other states with similar laws. The website creator has sought to begin her business for years but feared she would be subject to fines if she declined to serve same-sex couples with her custom website service.
In Gorsuch’s majority opinion, he said Justices Sotomayor’s dissent was a distortion of the case at hand, adding that it “reimagines the facts of this case from top to bottom.”
“In some places, the dissent gets so turned around about the facts that it opens fire on its own position,” Gorsuch wrote. “For instance: While stressing that a Colorado company cannot refuse ‘the full and equal enjoyment of [its] services’ based on a customer’s protected status … the dissent assures us that a company selling creative services ‘to the public’ does have a right ‘to decide what messages to include or not to include …’ But if that is true, what are we even debating?”
Rather than focusing on the key aspects of the case, Gorsuch said the dissent “spends much of its time adrift on a sea of hypotheticals about photographers, stationers, and others, asking if they too provide expressive services covered by the First Amendment.”
The court’s two other Democratic-appointed justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined the dissent.
“The unattractive lesson of the majority opinion is this: What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours. The lesson of the history of public accommodations laws is altogether different. It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social castes,” Sotomayor said.
But Gorsuch and the other five Republican-appointed justices held that the opinion is consistent with the First Amendment, saying the “Nation’s answer is tolerance, not coercion.”
“The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands. Colorado cannot deny that promise consistent with the First Amendment,” Gorsuch added.
Friday’s decision reversed a lower court ruling that sided against Smith. During a press conference on Friday, Smith and her counsel vehemently pushed back against the notion that she sought to deny service to same-sex couples due to their LGBT status.
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“I have always loved working with everyone. I serve people from all walks of life. I have clients who identify as LGBT. My case is about speech and when speech should be protected,” Smith said.
“Today’s victory protects not just me, but protects the LGBT website designer,” Smith added.