303 Creative, SCOTUS, and A Phantom Gay Wedding
In an ironic twist, on the day before the 4th of July, when many celebrate independence and freedom, Brad breaks down the recent SCOTUS ruling in the case 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which, in essence, opens the door for discrimination against several vulnerable groups on the basis of freedom of speech. The recent SCOTUS ruling notes that a website designer has the right to refuse the creation of websites for gay weddings.
What is interesting about this case, as Brad points out in the podcast is that there was no victim, in that, the person named in the case that supposedly contacted 303 Creative to create a website for their gay wedding claims they never contacted Lorie Smith at 303 creative, is not gay, is a cis-gendered man that has been married for 15 years and is a website developer himself.
Brad highlights the analysis of, friend of the show, Andrew Seidel’s article on religiondispactches.org noting,
This, this week, ADF, the Alliance for Defending Freedom designed the case this way so that no party who'd been discriminated against would be able to put a face on 303 Creatives’ bigotry by erasing the true targets of the bigotry. ADF manipulated the narrative. There was no couple to interview, no actual victims, only ADF’s client and her version of the non-event.
What Andrew's saying there is that ADF, uh, manufactured this case such that. There was no gay couple who could be on tv. A gay couple that looked sympathetic and sounded very civil, very normal, very ordinary, very something people who might elicit care, empathy, and other feelings from the general public. They designed it in a way that the victim was faceless.
Later in the episode, Brad illustrates how this case and the decision of SCOTUS have at its core two competing narratives. One focused on identity and the other on expression. Brad aptly states,
Indeed, the party stipulated that the web designer, Lorie Smith, was willing to work with all people regardless of classifications including sexual orientation. She was simply not willing to design websites that contained messages that violated her religious beliefs. Okay, so this is the place where we run into the two competing narratives about our public square. Okay, here's one. Regardless of who you are, black, white, Asian, Latinx, Native American, regardless of your race, regardless of your sexual, uh, your sex, man, woman, non-binary, so on, regardless of your religion, regardless of your sexual orientation.
You have a right to be served in public by all things available to the public. That's one narrative. Here's another narrative. Another narrative says that if my religious beliefs somehow mean that I cannot engage in business with a certain group of people, then I am protected by the Constitution and the protection of the freedom of religion.
You see, one of them is about identity. It's about I'm a person. With a certain identity and you are not allowed to refuse me service because of my identity. The other one is about religious belief and expression. And I wanna be clear, this case is actually about expression. And it's basically saying that if you ask me to create things that go against my expression, in this case, my religious beliefs and, and what I think should be expressed related to marriage.