Sonoma County civil and gay rights advocates decry Supreme Court same-sex ruling they say will pave the way for more discrimination

Sonoma County civil and gay rights advocates on Friday decried the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in favor of a Colorado website designer who refuses to create websites celebrating same-sex weddings out of religious objections.

The ruling, they say, could pave the way for increased discrimination against members of the LGBTQ+ community and other groups, including racial and ethnic minorities.

“It’s a huge step backward and a very sad result,” said Nicole Jaffee, a Santa Rosa civil litigator and trial attorney who focuses civil rights. "It really shows how damaging this ruling could potentially be for not just members of the LGBTQ population, but potentially other people moving forward — other protected classes.“

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that designer Lorie Smith can refuse to design websites for same-sex weddings despite a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation, race, gender and other characteristics.

The court said forcing her to create the websites would violate her free speech rights under the Constitution’s First Amendment, suggesting that artists, photographers, videographers and writers are among those who can refuse to offer what the court called expressive services if doing so would run contrary to their beliefs.

Jaffee, a partner with the Santa Rosa firm Perry, Johnson, Anderson, Miller & Moskowitz, said the decision sets a dangerous precedent that could lead to discrimination by a wider class of business owners. She said the court’s dissenting opinion, written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor was “spot on.”

Sotomayor, one of the three more liberal justices in the minority, argued that under the court’s new precedent a business owner who does passport photos could make a case for only selling passport photos for white people.

“To allow a business open to the public to define the expressive quality of its goods or services to exclude a protected group would nullify public accommodations laws,” Sotomayor wrote. “It would mean that a large retail store could sell ‘passport photos for white people.’”

Jaffee said the court’s decision centered on beliefs and views about same-sex marriage — for the moment.

“Right now, this is just limited to gay marriage,” she said. “However, the (court’s) analysis could be used for all other types of protected classes.”

"It really eats away at a lot of the strides that have been made in the civil rights movement,“ Jaffee said. ”I find that really troubling.“

But Bishop Robert Vasa of the Santa Rosa Catholic Diocese, in an email Friday, said the Supreme Court “rightly” struck a balance between competing legal interests.

“On the one hand, there are legally recognized, but not universally accepted, rights of free association including marriage to persons of any gender,” he wrote. “At the same time there are other rights, such as free speech and freedom from coercion in speech, which must also be protected.”

Vasa said Smith, the Colorado website designer — as a creative professional — has a free speech right to refuse to undertake work that conflicts with her views.

“The views which she holds are generally consistent with Judeo-Christian values and she cannot rightly be compelled to set those deeply held, presumably religious, views aside,” Vasa wrote.

Katrina Phillips, chair of the Sonoma County Human Rights Commission, disagreed with that conclusion.

Phillips, who worked for several years as a counselor for at-risk youth at the Los Angeles LGBTQ Center, said the conservative court majority was simply “pandering” to the religious right and its efforts to normalize bigotry by cherry-picking from Judeo-Christian religious texts.

“What’s missing is exactly what's also in the Bible, which is love thy neighbor and do unto others as you would have done unto you,” Phillips said.

“It really makes me upset when people try to quote the Bible to strengthen their own bigotry or racist remarks or beliefs,” she said. “It's kind of like the internet — you're gonna find whatever you want to support what you believe, to make you feel better about your choices.”

Jaffee, the Santa Rosa attorney, said that as a lawyer, a parent and a biracial individual, she’s concerned about the current direction of the Supreme Court.

The conservative majority has now unwound existing law or previous court precedent governing a vast swath of American life. It has weakened gun control, narrowed federal wetland protections, overturned the federal right to an abortion and scuttled landmark safeguards for voting rights and limits against political gerrymandering.

In two other rulings this week, the court outlawed the use of race-based affirmative action as a factor in college admissions and shot down President Joe Biden’s plan to erase $400 billion in student loan debt for more than 40 million Americans.

Among critics of those decisions, the debatable merit of lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices is now coming into sharper view.

But Jaffee also said she remains hopeful about the future.

“What can happen is, hopefully, there'll be other cases that come up to the Supreme Court that have a different result, to have more protection for people that are in the protected classes,“ she said.

”I think that's probably the only thing that could happen in the near future, as opposed to waiting until there's a change in who is on the bench.“

The Associated Press contributed to this story. You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @pressreno.