Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court completed its term on a bleak note: ending affirmative action, blocking President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and allowing a website designer in Colorado to refuse service to LGBTQ+ people.
This last ruling — in a case known as 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis — took a surprising turn when it was revealed a key fact asserted in the lawsuit — that a man named Stewart had asked the plaintiff to design a same-sex wedding website — was untrue. Stewart, whose last name has been withheld, in fact, never contacted the firm, was not getting married and, in fact, has been married to a woman for more than a decade.
Making matters worse, the state of Colorado, who was charged with defending against the lawsuit, stipulated to most of the underlying facts of the case including the story about Stewart. By the time the Supreme Court considered the case, there had been too little interrogation of the asserted facts to determine if they were true.
Critics of the decision have questioned whether the attorneys for the plaintiff – a Christian web designer who sought to be permitted to discriminate against LGBTQ+ couples seeking wedding website designs – knew or should have known that the story about Stewart was false. They have also debated what, if anything, the Supreme Court should do now.
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