Supreme Court Turns Down Appeal in Clash Between Florist and Gay Couple
The justices let stand a gay couple’s victory against a florist who said her religious beliefs did not allow her to create floral arrangements for same-sex weddings.
New York Times
By Adam Liptak
July 2, 2021
The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would not hear an appeal from a florist in Washington State who said she had a constitutional right to refuse to create a floral arrangement for a same-sex wedding. The move left open a question the court last considered in 2018, when a similar dispute between a Colorado baker and a gay couple failed to yield a definitive ruling.
As is its custom, the court did not give reasons for declining to hear the case, which social conservatives had hoped the justices would use to make a clearer statement favoring religious beliefs over gay rights. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch said they would have granted the florist’s petition seeking Supreme Court review.
The owners of businesses challenging those laws have argued that the government should not force them to choose between the requirements of their faiths and their livelihoods, citing constitutional protections for free speech and religious liberty.
The case concerning the florist, Arlene’s Flowers v. Washington, No. 19-333, started in 2013, when Barronelle Stutzman turned down a request from a longtime customer, Robert Ingersoll, to provide flowers for his wedding to another man, Curt Freed. Ms. Stutzman said her religious principles did not allow her to do so.
This is BIG! Really big! Humongous Big!
The big worry was that the court would say the people have a right to discriminate if it was against their religion. But the Supreme Court stepped back and said… nothing. Just nope we don’t want to hear it, we are stratified in the lower court’s ruling.
Ria Tabacco Mar, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the couple, welcomed Friday’s development but said there was more work to be done.
“No one should walk into a store and have to wonder whether they will be turned away because of who they are,” she said. “Preventing that kind of humiliation and hurt is exactly why we have nondiscrimination laws. Yet 60 percent of states still don’t have express protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people like the kind in Washington State.”
Meanwhile the opposition legal team the Alliance Defending Freedom (You should remember them, they are the ones that brought the case of the Connecticut trans athlete and they are behind all the anti-trans bills by the Republicans.) said...
Kristen K. Waggoner, a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented Ms. Stutzman, also said there was more work to do. “Although the outcome of this case is tragic,” she said, “the critical work of protecting the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans must continue. No one should be forced to express a message or celebrate an event they disagree with.”The Georgia Voice said,
By refusing to hear Arlene’s Flowers, the Supreme Court is avoiding that issue for now and leaving intact a decision of the Washington State Supreme Court, which ruled against the florist twice—once before and once after the Masterpiece decision.And so the battle continues...
[…]
On the downside, the Supreme Court Friday agreed to hear a case where, once again, religious entities are trying to find workarounds to laws and policies separating church and state. The court granted review to Carson v. Makin, which is not an LGBTQ-related case but is yet another case in which religious entities are seeking special dispensation under ordinary law. It’s also a case that echoes the arguments religious entities have been making to avoid complying with non-discrimination laws: that the religious person isn’t discriminating against a gay person but discriminating against a person because his or her partner is of the same sex.
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