Lorie Smith, the owner of 303 Creative, a website design company in Colorado, speaks with supporters outside of the U.S. Supreme Court Building on Dec. 5, 2022, in Washington, DC. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in her favor Friday. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

This story was updated Friday afternoon.

Colorado cannot compel a website designer to create custom sites for same-sex couples, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an opinion released Friday.

The 6-3 ruling, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, came in?303 Creative v. Elenis. Plaintiff Lorie Smith argued the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, violates her constitutional right to free speech.? She believes, based on her religion, that?marriage should be between one man and one woman,?and therefore she does not want to create wedding websites that feature her own original content for same-sex couples.

Aubrey Elenis, who is named as a defendant, is the director of the Colorado Civil Rights Division.

“The First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which the designer disagrees,” the court said.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, during a Friday news conference at the Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center in Denver, cast the ruling as an extreme shift that will allow all sorts of businesses to discriminate against many different communities.

“Today’s decision in 303 Creative permits businesses to turn away customers because of who they are,” Weiser said. “Based on the claimed ‘expressive’ interest, this radical opinion is far out of step of the will of the American people and our values as Americans. It is a significant departure from decades of established cases that all uphold the principle that our nation is committed to equal justice for all.”

Smith argued that creating the kind of websites she envisions is a form of speech, while the defendants argued it’s a service, and therefore “public accommodation” laws apply. Smith’s team said during oral arguments in December that the anti-discrimination law constitutes compelled speech in Smith’s case, meaning she would be forced to convey messages against her personal beliefs.

The court’s opinion says that while many states’ public accommodations laws have extended to cover most forms of business operations, “no public accommodations law is immune from the demands of the Constitution,” and therefore cannot compel speech.

“In this case, Colorado seeks to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance,” the court said. “As this Court has long held, the opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties and part of what keeps our Republic strong.”

Gorsuch was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett in the majority opinion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“As I will explain, the law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group.”

This is the second case from Colorado related to LGBTQ discrimination that made its way to the Supreme Court. The first was?Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which involved a cake shop owner who denied a same-sex couple a wedding cake based on religious beliefs. The Masterpiece case focused on the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause, while the 303 Creative case focused on the free speech clause.

Sweeping effects

In his remarks Friday, Weiser emphasized the potential broad implications of the ruling. He said the court’s decision “means a business could refuse to serve an interracial couple claiming that interracial marriage is wrong. It means a payroll company or photographer could say, ‘I don’t want to do business with women-owned businesses, because I don’t believe women should be working outside the home.’ It means a bookseller of religious texts could say, ‘I’m not going to sell books to a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because I don’t believe that it’s a legitimate religion,’ and so on.”

President Joe Biden in a statement echoed Weiser’s interpretation.

“While the Court’s decision only addresses expressive original designs, I’m deeply concerned that the decision could invite more discrimination against LGBTQI+ Americans,” Biden said in a statement. “More broadly, today’s decision weakens long-standing laws that protect all Americans against discrimination in public accommodations — including people of color, people with disabilities, people of faith, and women.”

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, the country’s first openly gay man elected governor, noted that while the ruling did not invalidate the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Law, it opened a legal pathway for business owners who claim they’re selling “expressive” or “artistic” items to discriminate.

“Unfortunately, Americans have seen the Supreme Court become increasingly obsessed with taking away freedoms,” Polis said in a statement.

Weiser suggested a solution Friday.

“On the legal front, we’re going to do all we can to work to limit the impact of this decision and, ultimately, to overturn this decision,” Weiser said during the news conference, adding, referring the Supreme Court’s reversal of the constitutional right to get an abortion, “Like the Dobbs decision of last year, this decision is not what our Constitution, what our democratic republic, stands for, which is founded on the promise of equal justice for all.”

The most important response to the ruling is for businesses to choose to serve everyone, he said.

This was a message that Nadine Bridges, executive director of One Colorado, which advocates for the LGBTQ community, voiced during the news conference.

“We call on all fair-minded businesses and owners to condemn discrimination and continue the long-standing commitment to treat everyone with dignity and respect and to remain open to all,” Bridges said.

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: [email protected]. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.

Teenage protesters and a few parents fill the Tennessee House of Representatives gallery on March 30 to ask for safe gun laws. (Tennessee Lookout photo by John Partipilo)

As the riot of gun violence in America produces fresh massacres by the day, firearm fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge the blood on their hands, and their suicidal stance in the face of escalating carnage is that more guns are the answer.

But it’s worse than that.

Take a close look at the arguments that gun extremists advance and a dark truth emerges. They repeatedly put defense against tyranny at the center of their claim to unfettered access to firearms. In the almost 232 years since the ratification of the Second Amendment, individual gun owners have had no substantial or sustained occasion to take up arms against the federal government. Yet guns are involved in almost 49,000 annual deaths in the United States. Anyone who has studied the matter arrives at the simple conclusion that more guns mean more death, and the gun-permissive U.S. is an extreme outlier in the developed world.

The nature of gun violence in America therefore amounts to a proxy war, with school children targeted as unwitting infantry and grocery store shoppers conscripted as cannon fodder. Attackers armed as if for military engagement, backed by Second Amendment fanatics, are deployed in public to kill unsuspecting innocents.

This is a hot war. We know which side is the aggressor. Gun extremists aren’t just political misfits. They are belligerents.

It is true that the framers crafted the Second Amendment as a defense against a form of 18th-century tyranny. Some representatives from the various states were wary of a strong federal government that could establish a standing army and dissolve state militias, and the right to “keep and bear arms” is explicitly tied to militia service in the text of the one-sentence, 27-word amendment.

What’s not explicit in the amendment is an individual right concerning firearms. In the records of the First Federal Congress, which produced the amendment, “There was no discussion at all about private ownership of guns,” notes Ray Raphael in his annotated U.S. Constitution.

Second Amendment scholar Michael Waldman makes a similar point. “There is not a single word about an individual’s right to a gun for self-defense or recreation in (James) Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention. Nor was it mentioned, with a few scattered exceptions, in the records of the ratification debates in the states. Nor did the U.S. House of Representatives discuss the topic as it marked up the Bill of Rights,” Waldman wrote in Politico Magazine.

Courts treated relevant cases accordingly, and state and local governments adopted gun restrictions more or less uncontroversially for more than two centuries.

That all changed with the rise of the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment fanaticism in recent decades. It wasn’t until the 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller that the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time said the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to own a gun.

But the ruling was criticized even by some prominent conservative legal observers. No less an authority than Justice Antonin Scalia, who authored the majority opinion, wrote that the Second Amendment was “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” Moreover, right there in the text of the Heller opinion, Scalia allowed that in 21st-century society “where gun violence is a serious problem,” the notion that the Second Amendment “is outmoded” was open to debate, though such a debate was beyond the court’s purview.

But far-right leaders who genuflect to deadly weapons treat a post-Constitution compromise as God-given gospel, and they are willing to watch the bodies of murdered children pile up as a price for their beliefs.

Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, the preeminent and clown-like mascot of the gun lobby, has mastered the language favored by the “shall not be infringed” fringe, as when she tweeted, “Our Founders wisely knew that the right to keep and bear arms was the last line of defense against tyranny.”?

Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida embraced a similar interpretation when he told a crowd, “The Second Amendment is about maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government if that becomes necessary.”

As Democrats in the Colorado Legislature advanced a set of gun violence-prevention bills, Republican extremists voiced factually incorrect, mass murder-inducing views about gun rights.

“The Second Amendment says, ‘Shall not be infringed upon.’ That means nothing — you cannot do anything to affect the Second Amendment. That’s what the Constitution says,” state Rep. Scott Bottoms, a pastor from Colorado Springs, said, adding, predictably, that “the Second Amendment is based upon protecting yourself primarily from tyrannical government.”

This armed conflict envisioned by gun zealots has yet to materialize directly. But it has cost tens of thousands of lives every year. More than 10,000 people have died from gun violence in the U.S. so far in 2023 — well more than the number of Americans who died fighting the Revolutionary War. There have already been at least 130 mass shootings this year, the latest having occurred at an elementary school in Nashville, where three 9-year-olds were among the victims. East High School in Denver has been the site of two instances of gun violence just this year. Gun violence is the leading cause of death among America’s youth.

The far right’s fantasies about armed resistance against some abstract tyranny are made real in the form of countless corpses on America’s streets and in public places throughout the country. Firearm fanatics like Boebert and Bottoms are the cowardly battle commanders who would not show themselves at the front lines but are nevertheless responsible for the bloodshed, and their obstinance in the face of dead school children is a derangement that favors human sacrifice over functional society. They are obsessed with “rights,” but they have forfeited the right to be welcomed as good-faith participants in debates on guns, since democracy is hostile to proxy-war combatants.

It is inconceivable that America’s founders would approve of what gun rights absolutists have made of the Second Amendment. And any constitutional provision is only valuable insofar as it serves us — living Americans trying to make the best common existence for ourselves under current conditions.

The Constitution was made to be reformed, which the presence of amendments makes plain. Lives are superior to laws. But that’s a proposition gun extremists would have us all shot to oppose.