Despite the fact that standing in the case was based on a fraud, in a 6-3 decision the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado website designer Lorie Smith had the right to refuse to design a website for a same-sex wedding because it would violate her beliefs. And then they completed the trifecta by striking down President Biden's student loan forgiveness plan. The full opinion is here.
Justice Sotomayor wrote a fiery dissent and read it from the bench. Here's an excerpt:
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. Specifically, the Court holds that the First Amendment exempts a website-design company from a state law that prohibits the company from denying wedding websites to same-sex couples if the company chooses to sell those websites to the public. The Court also holds that the company has a right to post a notice that says, “ ‘no [wedding websites] will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages.’ ”
A 6-3 majority ruled that website design is speech, and so designing a website for a gay wedding for a fictitious gay couple would violate the designer's First Amendment rights because a website is something done with "heart and head and hands." They also made a strange distinction between identity and behavior. They tried to split the baby in half by saying that the website discrimination isn't allowed because the customers are gay, but because the behavior of gay weddings is objectionable.
A distinction without a difference. Worse yet, Lorie Smith never ever designed a wedding website. She was a puppet put up by the hateful Alliance Defending Freedom (oh, so much irony in that name) to push the case to the Supreme Court so that they could discriminate against LGBTQ+ couples.
Justice Sotomayor ends her dissent with this:
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. And for that to be true, it must be true in the public market. For the “promise of freedom” is an empty one if the Government is “powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of [one person] will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of a[nother].” Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409, 443 (1968). Because the Court today retreats from that promise, I dissent.
After Justice Sotomayor finished reading her opinion from the bench, the last opinion of the day was released: Student loan forgiveness. It will surprise no one to discover that the court voted to strike it down. I would appreciate it if, going forward, protests about student loan forgiveness were directed fully at the court and not Biden, who kept his promise before the court squashed the effort.
This will affect students of color the most, because they are the ones most likely to have accumulated student debt to get through school.
President Biden has been anticipating this decision and is expected to announce some other policies to help with debt relief, though they won't be as robust as his student loan forgiveness program was.
[Correction: The entire court voted to strike down student loan forgiveness]
