Supreme Court Justices Attack Each Other Over Gay Wedding Case
Supreme Court justices attacked one another in a controversial ruling involving a website designer from Colorado who did not want to design same-sex wedding websites.On Friday in 303 Creative LLC v.
Elenis, the Court ruled 6-3 in favor of Lorie Smith, who argued she should not have to serve certain customers due to her religious beliefs as a Christian.
Because the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act prohibits businesses from openly discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, among other factors, Smith argued that the state law violated her free speech and religious rights under the First Amendment.Justice Neil Gorsuch, who delivered the majority opinion on behalf of the Court's six Republican appointees, used six pages of his opinion to criticize Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent, signaling just how divided the Court's ideological gap has grown since it moved to a 6-3 conservative supermajority in 2020.
It also comes a day after Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson sparred in another ruling on affirmative action policies in college admissions."It is difficult to read the dissent and conclude we are looking at the same case," Gorsuch wrote, scrutinizing the dissent for taking "more than halfway into its opinion" to answer the question before the Court and for getting "so turned around about the facts that it opens fire on its own position."Sotomayor fired off her own scathing dissent of the majority opinion, slamming the decision for marking "gays and lesbians for second-class status.""The opinion of the Court is, quite literally, a notice that reads: 'Some services may be denied to same-sex couples,'" she wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Jackson."The unattractive lesson.
