The Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of a Colorado-based evangelical Christian designer who refused to create websites for same-sex weddings, a major blow to gay rights nationwide.

What You Need To Know

  • The Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of a Colorado-based evangelical Christian designer who refused to create websites for same-sex weddings

  • The 6-3 ruling along the high court's ideological lines held that the First Amendment bars the state from forcing Lorie Smith to create a website with a message she disagrees with, despite a state law that bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation

  • The decision is another in the trend of rulings in favor of religious liberties, while reversing more than two decades of strengthening rights for LGBTQ Americans

  • The Supreme Court's three liberals, Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented; Sotomayor called it "a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people"

The 6-3 ruling along the high court's ideological lines held that the First Amendment bars the state from forcing Lorie Smith to create a website with a message she disagrees with, despite a state law that bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and other factors.

"The First Amendment’s protections belong to all, not just to speakers whose motives the government finds worthy," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. "Colorado seeks to force an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance."

Gorsuch later wrote that "the First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands. Colorado cannot deny that promise consistent with the First Amendment."

"As this Court has long held, the opportunity to think for ourselves and to express those thoughts freely is among our most cherished liberties and part of what keeps our Republic strong," Gorsuch wrote.

Smith's supporters said that a ruling in her favor would ensure that artists could not be compelled to create work that is against their personal beliefs, but opponents said that it could open up a wide range of discrimination for businesses.

"As surely as Ms. Smith seeks to engage in protected First Amendment speech, Colorado seeks to compel speech Ms. Smith does not wish to provide," he wrote, charging that ruling in favor of Colorado would create an untenable situation for the web designer.

"If she wishes to speak, she must either speak as the State demands or face sanctions for expressing her own beliefs, sanctions that may include compulsory participation in 'remedial . . . training,' filing periodic compliance reports, and paying monetary fines," Gorsuch wrote. "That is an impermissible abridgement of the First Amendment’s right to speak freely."

The Supreme Court's three liberals, Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

"Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class," Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.

"LGBT people have existed for all of human history. And as sure as they have existed, others have sought to deny their existence, and to exclude them from public life," she wrote. "Those who would subordinate LGBT people have often done so with the backing of law."

"Today is a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people," she wrote.

The decision is another in the trend of rulings in favor of religious liberties, while reversing more than two decades of the high court strengthening rights for LGBTQ+ Americans, notably giving same-sex couples the right to marry in 2015 and announcing five years later in a decision written by Gorsuch that a landmark civil rights law also protects gay, lesbian and transgender people from employment discrimination.

Even as it has expanded gay rights, however, the court has been careful to say those with differing religious views needed to be respected. The belief that marriage can only be between one man and one woman is an idea that “long has been held — and continues to be held — in good faith by reasonable and sincere people here and throughout the world,” then-Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the court's gay marriage decision.

The court returned to that idea five years ago when it was confronted with the case of a Christian baker who objected to designing a cake for a same-sex wedding. The court issued a limited ruling in favor of the baker, Jack Phillips, saying there had been impermissible hostility toward his religious views in the consideration of his case. Phillips' lawyer, Kristen Waggoner, of the Alliance Defending Freedom, also brought the most recent case to the court. On Friday, she said the Supreme Court was right to reaffirm that the government cannot compel people to say things they do not believe.

“Disagreement isn’t discrimination, and the government can’t mislabel speech as discrimination to censor it,” she said in a statement.

Smith, who owns a Colorado design business called 303 Creative, does not currently create wedding websites. She has said that she wants to but that her Christian faith would prevent her from creating websites celebrating same-sex marriages. And that’s where she runs into conflict with state law.

Colorado, like most other states, has a law forbidding businesses open to the public from discriminating against customers. Colorado said that under its so-called public accommodations law, if Smith offers wedding websites to the public, she must provide them to all customers, regardless of sexual orientation. Businesses that violate the law can be fined, among other things. Smith argued that applying the law to her violates her First Amendment rights. The state disagreed.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.