The Colorado High Court Rules in Discriminating Designs to the Detriment of Religious and Social Inequality: The Dissenting Opinion of Justice Sonia Sotomayor

The Colorado government can’t force a designer to create designs that are different from what they think is right.

Under Colorado law she would not be able to establish a custom web-page business for weddings, even if she did want to, because she wouldn’t be able to make websites that violated her faith. Colorado said it didn’t want to dictate what Smith said in her web designs, but that if her business is open to the public–as it is–it had to serve everyone.

In the Dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor calls the case a “profoundly wrong and reactionary” idea. “The law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment,” Sotomayor writes. Our Constitution doesn’t allow service to be refused to a disfavored group.

The new conservative supermajority reached out ferociously, agreeing to decide a case in which nobody had yet filed a discrimination claim.

On Friday, the court ruled against the state and for the web designer in a decision that could have profound consequences in Colorado and 29 other states that have laws requiring businesses open to the public to serve everyone, regardless or race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.