You guys, people are being mean to this Christian white lady who not only hates gays, but got the highest court in the nation to take their rights away—which you might call, among other things, “mean”—and she’s really shocked and hurt. And now she is giving serious Gretchen Wieners “I can’t help it if I’m popular” energy.
The last few days have been an absolute horror show in the U.S. Supreme Court, with the unbalanced conservative-led court handing down blow after blow in decisions that affect vulnerable communities terribly. On Friday, in a disastrous gut punch to LGBTQIA rights, the conservative justices ruled in favor of a self-professed Christian web designer, Lorie Smith, who said she hypothetically doesn’t like the idea of making wedding websites for gay marriages at some point in the future and took her icky feeling all the way to the Supreme Court to make sure she wouldn’t have to deal with any queer people (should they/we ever want to interact with her for some reason).
So now, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, this decision gives “… a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”
Meanwhile, Smith, who owns 303 Creative, a design company based in Denver, Colorado, has not gotten any actual requests to make a gay website. She just doesn’t want to have to in case anyone asks. It turns out that the gay wedding work request her lawsuit originally cited was found to be fake. And Smith, who has clearly gone very far out of her way to push a lawsuit over a hypothetical situation all the way to the Supreme Court in order to separate herself from that which she deems unholy (and probably mostly to get attention), is ironically very critical of the people who send her “hateful” and “intolerant” messages online. Like girl, can you look at yourself and your own actions for a second?
Smith has a section on her website about the lawsuit where she writes, “I am very sorry that some people are so intolerant of my beliefs – beliefs shared by many Jews, Muslims, Christians, and nonreligious people in this country and the throughout the world. As you know, I try to treat everyone with respect and I wish they would do the same.” And I would like to know how going to court to strip millions of people of their basic rights is treating everyone with respect?! Make it make sense, Lorie!
“To those who have filled my inbox with vile, hate-filled messages,” she also writes, on her lawsuit page, “If we disagree, we should be able to do so civilly. That is the mark of a healthy and free society. And while I think people should always strive to treat each other with politeness and consideration and speak in ways reflecting that…” And I’m at a loss. Politeness and consideration are two terms that just don’t jibe with your lawsuit that will probably become the precedent for stripping away anti-discrimination laws for all sorts of protected groups of people.
As Sotomayor wrote, the logic behind the decision “cannot be limited to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity,” explaining that the logic could be extended to refuse a wedding website for an interracial couple, or a “stationer could refuse to sell a birth announcement for a disabled couple because she opposes their having a child. A large retail store could reserve its family portrait services for ‘traditional’ families. And so on.”
Basically, Lorie Smith, I am glad I have my right to free speech today because I’m going to use it to say I really, really don’t like you.
(featured image: Moneymaker/Getty Images)
