On Friday the US supreme court expanded the right to free speech into a right of businesses to discriminate. In a 6-3 decision, with the majority opinion by Neil Gorsuch, the justices declared that a Colorado civil rights statute prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in public businesses violates the first amendment’s freedom of speech. The ruling appears to formalize the right of homophobic business owners to not serve gay people in some situations.
303 Creative v Elenis concerns a woman, Lorie Smith, who operates a website design service and wishes to be exempted from a Colorado civil rights law that requires her to treat all customers equally. Specifically, Smith, a conservative Christian, wants to be able to refuse service to same-sex couples seeking wedding websites, and to be able to place a banner on the home page of her business declaring that she will not make such sites. The court has in recent years dramatically expanded the free exercise of religion clause, often granting conservative Christian plaintiffs leeway to curtail their personal obligations to the law. But 303 Creative offers a different theory of the case: that the legal requirement not to discriminate against gay people is a violation of the plaintiff’s free speech.
