The gay couple at the center of a lawsuit against a conservative Christian baker who refused to sell them a wedding cake slammed the U.S. Supreme Court for putting a dent in LGBTQ rights on Friday.
In an opinion piece for USA Today, Charlie Craig and David Mullins reflected on the new decision five years after the couple narrowly lost their case before the Supreme Court, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
The court’s 2018 ruling against Craig and Mullins had left broader questions about discrimination and the First Amendment unresolved.
Its new ruling, in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, provided clarity at the expense of gay rights as the conservative court made it easier for businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.
“The court’s decision allows a business owner’s rights to trump the civil rights of less-favored minorities. The opinion promotes supremacy at the expense of equality,” the couple wrote.
Like the Masterpiece case, the 303 Creative lawsuit also grew out of a religious business owner’s refusal to serve a gay couple.
But no one had actually been hurt in the 303 Creative case. The gay couple was imaginary. The owner of the website company, Lorie Smith, was merely worried about the possibility she would be asked to create a wedding website for such a client if she started offering to design wedding websites.
Craig and Mullins said that was by design. The right-wing group representing the Masterpiece baker, the Alliance Defending Freedom, was the same group involved in defending the web designer.
The couple said the ADF “manufactured the 303 Creative case as something of a legal do-over” without the emotional, human component that they brought to the case.
“The ADF learned its lesson that when LGBTQ+ people have a chance to share their humanity with the courts and the country, it becomes harder for them to paint a distorted, inaccurate and frightening picture of a predatory community trampling the rights of religious individuals,” Craig and Mullins wrote.
The court’s Friday ruling “brings back the fear and feelings of alienation we lived fighting our case,” they said.
Both cases involved public accommodations, which refers to businesses that are open to the public. Both were also based in Colorado, which has a law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of characteristics including race, gender identity and sexual orientation.
On Friday, the Supreme Court declared that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law interfered with Smith’s First Amendment rights because her creative web design work could be considered “speech” and the state would compel her to make speech she disagrees with on religious grounds.
In a searing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision opened up a sea of disturbing possibilities, giving the example of a conservative photographer who might refuse to photograph an interracial couple or a funeral home that would refuse to handle the body of a gay man.
“It was never about a cake for us,” Craig and Mullins wrote. “It was always about standing up to homophobia. It was about equality.”
“That’s what the Supreme Court is supposed to protect. That’s what the words carved into the building itself promise: ‘Equal Justice Under Law.’”