Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Law: Justifying Harms to Religious Minorities with Ideological Science

Jan 4, 2023 by Jill

by Amy Hamilton, Public Discourse:

While the minority stress theory has been effective in helping advance an “ideological agenda” for “social change,” it has been much less effective in explaining the negative health disparities found among sexual minorities, disparities which remain despite ever-broadening social acceptance. Invoking minority stress theory is not about protecting LGBT-identified people from harm. It’s about stamping out dissent and vilifying those who disagree.

In early December, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis and petitioner Lorie Smith, thus hearing a reprise of many of the arguments from its 2018 Masterpiece Cakeshop decision in the case of Jack Phillips against Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA). Once again, CADA is being weaponized against Colorado’s religious citizens for their beliefs about marriage, and its proponents cite scientifically dubious research on health harms for justification.

In fact, CADA causes far more harm than it claims to prevent, as in the case of conscientious objector Lorie Smith. CADA reads:

It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful for a person, . . . directly or indirectly: to refuse . . . the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation; . . . [or to] publish . . . communications . . . [saying] that an individual’s patronage or presence at a place of public accommodation is unwelcome, objectionable, unacceptable, or undesirable; because of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, national origin, or ancestry.

Smith operates a website design business in Colorado, 303 Creative LLC, where she uses her talents to tell the stories of her clients. She happily welcomes all persons as clients, but there are some messages she cannot create: she can create a website for a man and a woman getting married, but not for other couples (or groups) who wish to marry.

Her policy has nothing to do with the individual clients per se, their claimed identity statuses, or even their declared sexual orientations. For instance, Smith could have created marriage messages for many of the over 450,000 LGBT-identified persons who reported being in opposite-sex marriages in a 2020 Gallup survey. But she could not do so for a heterosexually-identified couple entering into a polygamous marriage, such as a man taking a second wife while still married to his first. The reason lies in her deeply held convictions about the nature of marriage and her duty before God.

Read here