The 303 Creative v. Elenis case, involves a Colorado web designer named Lorie Smith who refuses to create websites for same-sex weddings and requests an exemption from anti-discrimination laws. The plaintiff claims in court documents that Stewart contacted Smith in September 2016 to discuss getting married to Mike “early next year.”
They “would love some design work done for our invitations, placenames, etc.,” he wrote. We could extend to a website as well. Stewart provided his contact information, including his phone number, email, and website address” the website revealed that he was also a designer.
In a case in which Stewart has a supporting role, the Supreme Court is anticipated to issue its ruling. According to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, this case may mark “the first time in the Court’s history… [that] a commercial business open to the public, serving the public, could refuse to serve a customer based on race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation.”
The court decided in favor of the web designer on Friday, 6-3. It only took a little while to get to him. His contact information was not redacted in the file, so I figured that at least some journalists had been in touch with him throughout the years regarding his website enquiry to 303 Creative.
In 2016, Smith and her legal team, the Christian right organization Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, first filed this matter before the United States District Court in Colorado, where they ultimately lost. On September 20 of that year, Smith and ADF filed the lawsuit, seeking the court to enjoin the state anti-discrimination legislation so that Smith could start restricting the couples she designs wedding websites for to heterosexual ones.
Smith had never created a wedding website until this point. (In reality, archived versions of the site demonstrate that her website did not contain any of the Christian propaganda that it did shortly after the lawsuit was filed in 2016 and does not today.)
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The “Stewart” question was made to Smith’s website on September 21, as revealed by the date-stamp in later court documents, suggesting that she got it the next day after the initial lawsuit was filed. However, the “Stewart” inquiry was not included in the initial lawsuit.
In the course of this legal dispute, it is unclear exactly when—or if—the enquiry from “Stewart” was evaluated and validated. (After all, his phone number was right there.) The defence argues in a motion submitted on October 19, 2016, that the action should be dismissed because Smith hasn’t actually received any requests for his services and hasn’t been harmed.
The ADF did not address the September 2016 “Stewart” probe to dispute the defense’s assertions in its answer the following month. Instead, ADF just said that Smith might have challenged the statute based on her concerns about the repercussions of denying services to a same-sex couple without first receiving an inquiry.
