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Dear Friend,
Something dangerous is happening in Colorado. This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a lawsuit that could undermine ALL civil rights laws across the nation. As an attorney at Muslim Advocates, I’d like to take a moment to walk you through this important case and our latest amicus brief urging the Court to protect the rights and dignity of all people.
Read our amicus brief here [[link removed]]
The original lawsuit, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis , involves website designer Lorie Smith, who is arguing that Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act violates her speech rights by requiring her to sell wedding websites to same-sex couples. She also argues that laws preventing her from posting a “straights-only” banner on her website violate her speech rights.
The implications of this case are staggering. Colorado’s public accommodations law mandates that businesses open to the public must equally serve all people without any discrimination due to race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation and other enumerated characteristics. Courts have long ruled that businesses operating in the public sphere are subject to government regulations from, say, safety laws on labor and hygiene to, as pertains to this case, those ensuring the equal treatment of its citizens.
What Ms. Smith and her network of well-funded, right-wing patrons are trying to do is permanently warp and weaponize the First Amendment to legalize discrimination. This includes discrimination against same-sex couples and LGBTQ+ people, including LGBTQ+ Muslims and other people of minority faiths. This also includes discrimination against all people who benefit from civil rights laws, including all American Muslims and all religious minorities.
If the Supreme Court buys this dangerous argument, a caterer, for example, might refuse to prepare food for an Eid celebration or a bat mitzvah on the grounds that doing so might be perceived as the caterer’s endorsement of Islam or Judaism. Of particular concern are the harms that could be inflicted on LGBTQ+ people of minority faiths, like LGBTQ+ Muslims, who stand to face multiple levels of discrimination due to their intersecting identities.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade [[link removed]] , we warned that the decision represented a dangerous Christian nationalization of American law that opens the door to the rollback of many other rights that protect minorities. 303 Creative is another escalation of this long-term assault on the rights of marginalized communities. We need to be clear in this turbulent time: a well-funded, right-wing movement is successfully rolling back the rights of American Muslims, of all religious minorities, of people of color, of people with disabilities, of LGBTQ+ communities and of all people who depend on hard-won civil rights laws to defend their freedoms and dignity. That is why we all must band together in solidarity.
That’s also why we are grateful to have partners like the Columbia Law School Law, Rights, and Religion Project and Hogan Lovells who helped us write the amicus brief in 303 Creative , as well as the 28 other faith and civil rights groups who signed on to our brief.
Please stay tuned for more updates from Muslim Advocates on this important case and also on the ongoing crisis in the Supreme Court and in courts across the nation. And, if you have been the victim of discriminatory practices at public businesses, please file a complaint here [[link removed]] and our legal team will get back to you shortly.
Also, this work is possible because of allies like you so please consider supporting us [[link removed]] in the ongoing fight to defend civil rights.
In solidarity,
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Chris Godshall-Bennett
Staff Attorney, Muslim Advocates
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