Posted on 06/30/2023 8:10:34 PM PDT by Ennis85
The veracity of a key document in a major LGBTQ+ rights case before the US supreme court has come under question, raising the possibility that important evidence cited in it might be wrong or even falsified.
The supreme court is expected to issue a ruling on Friday in 303 Creative LLC v Elenis, which deals with a challenge to a Colorado law prohibiting public-serving businesses from discriminating against gay people as well as any statements announcing such a policy.
The suit centers on Lorie Smith, a website designer who does not want to provide her services for gay weddings because of her religious objections.
In 2016, she says, a gay man named Stewart requested her services for help with his upcoming wedding. “We are getting married early next year and would love some design work done for our invites, placenames etc. We might also stretch to a website,” reads a message he apparently sent her through her website.
In court filings, her lawyers produced a copy of the inquiry.
But Stewart, who requested his last name be withheld for privacy, said in an interview with the Guardian that he never sent the message, even though it correctly lists his email address and telephone number. He has also been happily married to a woman for the last 15 years, he said. The news was first reported by the New Republic.
In fact, until he received a call this week from a reporter from the magazine, Stewart said he had no idea he was somehow tied up in a case that had made it to the supreme court.
“I can confirm I did not contact 303 Creative about a website,” he said. “It’s fraudulent insomuch as someone is pretending to be me and looking to marry someone called Mike. That’s not me.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
And Jane Roe was impregnated by a white man through consensual sex, but that fact wasn’t used to save 40 million babies’ lives.
If Stewart is not the plaintiff then I don’t understand how this message he allegedly sent her has any relevance whatsoever to the case (whether or not he really sent the message).
So the “despicable” decision that the state cannot force you to speak when you don’t not want to speak could be thrown out because it was moot before it was decided because the party had no standing to bring it and it was all based upon a fraud on the court?
Could very well be that Stewart was an activist who tried to put 303 Creative out of business by requesting a gay-wedding website for false purposes.
Well, to borrow some ‘rationale’ from the Left: Who cares what the facts of the case are, what is important is that the PROPER MESSAGE be sent, and it was sent - businesses can CHOOSE who they want for customers, at least when it comes to religious convictions.
Not only that but the petitioners’ case was never based on actual enforcement, but on threatened enforcement.
This case obviously did not start at the Supreme Court level.
This is a bogus attempt to discredit the findings.
“So the “despicable” decision that the state cannot force you to speak when you don’t not want to speak could be thrown out because it was moot before it was decided because the party had no standing to bring it and it was all based upon a fraud on the court?”
Maybe that’s the argument. But this is a declaratory relief action. In any event, the argument lost, whatever it was.
Was the Colorado law declared unconstitutional based originally on a fraudulent case filing?
If so the state might want to try to vacate the ruling that invalidated its precious law.
Sounds like the old Star Trek Kobiashi Maru ploy. Don’t just move the goal posts, eliminate them altogether.
So we were defrauded into ruling against your position and now you want to argue that you didn’t have that case in the first place because you don’t like the outcome of your fraud namely that you cannot use the courts to force someone to speak against their deeply held religious convictions.
“Was the Colorado law declared unconstitutional based originally on a fraudulent case filing?”
No. A declaratory judgment proceeding allows a party who is uncertain about its rights (here the web designer) to ask for a ruling making her rights clear. See, e.g. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/declaratory_judgment .
In this case, the web designer said she wanted to go into designing wedding sites but did not know whether Colorado law would punish her if she did not do a site celebrating gay marriage. So she brought the declaratory relief action as the plaintiff. The court made a ruling that clarified her rights.
The procedural status, in this case, is different than the Masterpiece Bakery cases, where an obvious setup of a business was the genesis of the lawsuit. There, the plaintiff was a Colorado state board.
“So we were defrauded into ruling against your position and now you want to argue that you didn’t have that case in the first place because you don’t like the outcome of your fraud namely that you cannot use the courts to force someone to speak against their deeply held religious convictions.”
Andy, I don’t understand your post. I agree with the result of the 303 case. The 303 case was not a fraudulently brought case. It was a declaratory judgment action, which is a well-established procedure to clarify ones rights. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/declaratory_judgment
I am good with the 303 decision and I believe it well and validly decided. But cooking up a nonplaintiff to bring a case even for declaratory relief when said plaintiff does not exist or does not have that case is among those things that fall in the category of barratry. As Gorsuch notes they are not deciding some other case. They are deciding this case. What happens if therefore this case does not actually exist. Now, the background is sort of irrelevant because the parties stipulated to the facts and sought judgment based on those facts. It still sounds like a fraud on the court.
Wow. Got certiorari and everything. Pretty impressive positioning from a business AND political/cultural perspective. Hats off.
“Wow. Got certiorari and everything. Pretty impressive positioning from a business AND political/cultural perspective. Hats off.”
And it presented a clean set of facts to the Court. Colorado’s EEOC making a ruling (ala Masterpiece Bakery) obfuscates the real dispute.
The other advantage of bringing it this way is it does not allow the gay lobby and the EEOC to ruin the plaintiff financially while the lawsuit is pending and it removes the risk to the plaintiff of not getting a ruling from the Supremes and thereby ending up with a $250000 fine and a sentence to reeducation camp.
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