Attorneys for a Colorado web designer using her personal Christian beliefs to sue over the state’s anti-discrimination law have reportedly included in their court filings a claim that a man, after their case was initially filed in 2016, asked her to create a website for his upcoming same-sex wedding.
The case, 303 Creative vs. Elenis, went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in December and likely will hand down its decision Friday.
The web designer, Lorie Smith, says she wants to expand her business to make wedding websites, but says she can’t because rejecting a same-sex couple’s request could violate Colorado law, and her religious beliefs do not support same-sex marriage.
Initially, no same-sex couple had asked her make a website for their wedding — not surprising since she wasn’t in the business of making wedding websites.
But after the case was filed, a same-sex couple named Stewart and Mike, according to court documents as The New Republic reports, did ask Smith for a wedding website. Stewart’s name, email address, phone number, and even his website URL were included in the filings, yet no reporter appears to have ever contacted him to verify his story.
Until now.
He says it’s false.
“It took just a few minutes to reach him,” The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant reported Thursday. “I assumed at least some reporters over the years had contacted him about his website inquiry to 303 Creative—his contact information wasn’t redacted in the filing. But my call, he said, was ‘the very first time I’ve heard of it.'”
Grant reports Stewart says his contact information is accurate, but “he never sent this form, he said, and at the time it was sent, he was married to a woman. ‘If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,’ Stewart explained.”
She adds, “it looks like Smith and her attorneys have, perhaps unwittingly, invented a gay couple in need of a wedding website in a case in which they argue that same-sex marriages are ‘false.'”
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“I don’t live inside Stewart’s computer—there’s a chance that he’s not telling me the whole story,” Grant offers, “that this is some elaborate prank he pulled years ago and doesn’t want to confess to now. But if he’s telling the truth—that this request was done completely without his knowledge—I don’t have any answers for him.. None of this makes sense to me.”
Smith is represented by attorneys from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which appears – along with a lengthy explanation for its inclusion – on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups.
Stewart had more to say.
“I’m not really sure where that came from,” Stewart told Grant, who says he “is a designer himself, something of a known quantity in design circles—he’s spoken at conferences and on podcasts, and has a ‘decent Twitter following,’ he said. The design world is small. But not small enough, he said, that he had heard of Lorie Smith—not until her case was already before the Supreme Court, and the design community began discussing its potential fallout.”
“I disagree with this, in the strongest possible terms,” Stewart told Grant of Smith’s desire to not create websites for same-sex couples. “I couldn’t disagree with her stance more.”
And Stewart has some questions of his own.
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“It didn’t make sense to him, he told me later via text message. Why would a web designer—as the website the inquiry referenced as his own made clear that he was—living in San Francisco, seek to hire someone in another state who has never built a wedding website, let alone a website for a same-sex wedding, to build his wedding website?”
Read The New Republic’s full report here.