Sotomayor blasts court in scathing dissent on same-sex wedding case

Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to back a Christian wedding website designer’s choice not to provide services to gay couples, calling the decision “profoundly wrong” in a scathing dissenting argument read from the bench. 

“Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class,” Sotomayor wrote.

The associate justice harkened back to the civil rights and women’s rights movements in her dissent, suggesting that in recent years, gender and sexual orientation minority groups have faced “backlash to the movement for liberty and equality.”

“New forms of inclusion have been met with reactionary exclusion. This is heartbreaking. Sadly, it is also familiar,” she wrote. “When the civil rights and women’s rights movements sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims.”

Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Sotomayor’s dissenting argument. 

Evangelical Christian Lorie Smith, who owns the website design company 303 Creative LLC, challenged Colorado’s public accommodation law on free speech grounds, claiming the state would force her to design wedding websites for same-sex couples if she planned to do so for opposite-sex marriages — despite her opposition to gay marriage. 

The Supreme Court decided in a 6-3 ruling Friday that Smith can refuse to endorse messages she doesn’t agree with and cannot be punished under Colorado’s anti-discrimination law for not providing her services to gay couples. 

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the high court’s majority opinion that “tolerance, not coercion, is our nation’s answer” on public accommodations law. 

“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,” he wrote. “Because Colorado seeks to deny that promise, the judgment is Reversed.”