Legal experts shoot down the idea that an apparently bogus inquiry to a site designer in Colorado opposed to same-sex marriages played a key role in last week's decision.
’s recent ruling in favor of an evangelical Christian web designer who refused to work on same-sex weddings did not hinge on what now appears to have been a request from a fake customer, legal experts told NBC News on Monday., the focus on the potential customer first arose after web designer Lorie Smith said in a previous court filing that someone named Stewart had reached out to her in 2016 about putting together a website for his marriage to a person named Mike.
"She’s saying I want to do something that's definitely against the law in Colorado. I think that’s probably enough for a pre-enforcement challenge," Shapiro said. Miller said the inclusion of the apparently phony inquiry in the court record shows “there are serious questions about the facts and record in this case.” The lawyers in the case should not have allowed “an unverified account to be part of the record,” Miller said.
Ed Whelan, a conservative attorney who's supportive of the court's decision, said what Smith was seeking was “standard First Amendment pre-enforcement relief,” and that the Colorado law she was challenging had her feeling she was “stuck between a rock and a hard place.” The federal judge who initially ruled on the case, Marcia S. Krieger, brushed off the relevance of the email in her decision, noting,"it is not clear that Stewart and Mike are a same-sex couple ."
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