Exactly one day before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its 6-3 decision in what has been called an “entirely hypothetical make-believe” case pitting conservative Christian beliefs masked as First Amendment speech against the rights of LGBTQ people to exist equally in the marketplaces of both commerce and ideas, a bombshell report revealed one critical fact in the case turned out to be false.
Apparently, so is a second one.
That first false “fact” – a claim in court documents that a San Francisco man, a graphic designer, years ago had reached out to the plaintiff, a Colorado Christian woman, to ask her to design among other items a wedding website for him and his soon-to-be husband, was almost certainly a lie. The man was and is married, to a woman, when the alleged inquiry came in, and had never even heard of the Christian designer, much less crossed state lines and his own Rolodex and personal skill set to ask her to create a wedding website she allegedly had never before even advertised, much less constructed.
The bombshell news on June 29 came via a report by Melissa Gira Grant at The New Republic.
And now, Melissa Gira Grant has more news – more proof of a possible fraudulent claim before the U.S. Supreme Court, not to mention all the lower courts that sided with the State of Colorado, and not the Christian designer, Lorie Smith (photo), who allegedly had one request for a same-sex wedding website while allegedly having never created any wedding website at all.
“So,” Grant said on social media Tuesday afternoon, “the Colorado website designer in the fake same-sex wedding website case, 303 Creative, it turns out, had made a wedding website, before filing her legal challenge.”
Over at The New Republic, the subhead reads: “An archive shows that the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case did once design a wedding website, contrary to what her lawyers presented during her legal challenge.”
Boom.
“The destination wedding website looks uncontroversial enough. The thumbnail preview of the site shows the happy couple’s names in teal and purple type, a mostly out-of-focus photo of a wedding dress trailing on a sandy beach and a couple’s bare feet, and a date and a location in Mexico,” Grant writes.
“In 2015, a web designer named Lorie Smith featured the wedding website in her portfolio of recent work—you can still access an archived copy of Smith’s site on the Wayback Machine. But you won’t find the wedding website in Smith’s live online portfolio anymore. The page detailing her role in the wedding website’s creation was removed some time before she filed a legal challenge—one that claimed she was unable to enter the wedding website business because Colorado’s anti-discrimination law would compel her to create same-sex wedding websites. The wedding website Smith made before she filed her case—and highlighted in a portfolio on her own site—is being reported for the first time in The New Republic.”
Smith’s legal team, the right-wing Christian nationalist Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which appears on the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s list of anti-LGBTQ hate groups, insists The New Republic’s reporting is simply a “media smear.”
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But facts are facts.
The U.S. Supreme Court took a case with what are now two “incorrect” pieces of information, and made a decision that, as the ADF suggests on its website, affects every person in the United States. Not only did the Supreme Court make a landmark decision on, at best, a faulty case, one that some legal experts have made clear it should never have even agreed to review, so did every lower court that ruled against Smith.
Responding to The New Republic’s latest bombshell report, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes, “Lorie Smith and her lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom repeatedly told the Supreme Court that she had never, ever made a wedding website, because she was afraid a same-sex couple might then request her services. That was a lie.”
“The wedding website that Lorie Smith DID make was scrubbed from the internet, though some of it can still be seen via the Wayback Machine,” he adds, pointing to TNR’s reporting.
Alex Aronson former Chief Counsel for U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Senate Judiciary Committee, writes: “Evidence continues to mount that the anti-LGBTQ extremist group Alliance Defending Freedom committed a fraud on the Supreme Court in its cooked-up 303 Creative case.”
Drexel University Professor of Law David S. Cohen states simply, “Apparently nothing about this case was true.”
NBC News senior reporter Ben Collins sums it all up: “This case continues to absolutely reek and nothing is being done about it.”