The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday
agreed to hear a case challenging Colorado's LGBTQ protections law.
Lorie Smith sued to have the law
withdrawn, claiming it would force her to create wedding websites for
gay and lesbian couples.
Last year, a three-judge panel of the
10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver denied Smith's
challenge to the law.
Smith is represented by the Alliance
Defending Freedom (ADF), an Arizona-based group opposed to LGBTQ
rights. ADF lawyers argued that the law forces Smith to violate her
Christian beliefs and has kept her from offering wedding-related
services such as websites through her company 303 Creative.
“Lorie Smith faces real and imminent
harm,” ADF lawyers claimed in their petition. “Five years after
leaving her corporate position to open her own website-design
business, she remains in limbo, unable to offer her design services
for marriage celebrations – prohibited even from posting a
statement about her marriage beliefs – and losing income.”
In a brief filed last year in support
of the law, LGBTQ legal group Lambda Legal said that the law was
about protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination and not about “cake
or websites or flowers.”
“This really isn’t about cake or
websites or flowers,” Lambda Legal senior counsel Jennifer C. Pizer
said in a statement. “It’s about protecting LGBTQ people and
their families from being subjected to slammed doors, service
refusals and public humiliation in countless places – from
fertility clinics to funeral homes and everywhere in between.”