Colorado Pays $1.5 Million For Violating Artist’s First Amendment Rights After Historic SCOTUS Case

Colorado has agreed to pay over $1.5 million after violating the First Amendment rights of a graphic designer who took her case to the United States Supreme Court.

The Court ruled in June that the state could not compel Lorie Smith and her design studio, 303 Creative, to create art that violates her religious beliefs. As a Christian, Smith believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Though she wanted to design wedding websites, Colorado’s discrimination laws would have required her to create same-sex wedding websites.

Smith, who was represented by lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom, asked the Supreme Court to say Colorado’s discrimination law violated her First Amendment rights. Her case followed that of Jack Phillips, a cake designer persecuted by LGBTQ activists in Colorado for over a decade for attempting to only design cakes consistent with his religious beliefs.

“After enduring Colorado’s censorship for nearly seven years, I’m incredibly grateful for the work of my attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom to bring my case to victory,” Smith said in a statement on Tuesday.  “As the Supreme Court said, I’m free to create art consistent with my beliefs without fear of Colorado punishing me anymore. This is a win not just for me but for all Americans—for those who share my beliefs and for those who hold different views.”

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Alliance Defending Freedom CEO Kristen Waggoner said that the “government can’t force Americans to say things they don’t believe, and Colorado officials have paid and will continue to pay a high price when they violate this foundational freedom.”

“For the past 12 years, Colorado has targeted people of faith and forced them to express messages that violate their conscience and that advance the government’s preferred ideology,” she said. “First Amendment protections are non-negotiable. Billions of people around the world believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman and that men and women are biologically distinct.”

“No government has the right to silence individuals for expressing these ideas or to punish those who decline to express different views,” Waggoner added. “Political and cultural winds shift, but the freedom to speak without fear of censorship is a God-given constitutionally guaranteed right, essential for a flourishing society and self-governing people.”

In October, the Colorado Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by the same trans-identifying attorney who has brought cases against Phillips for over 12 years — Autumn Scardina, a man who identifies as a woman. Scardina first contacted Phillips in 2012, calling the cake-maker a hypocrite and a bigot, according to Alliance Defending Freedom. Scardina has requested that Phillips create cakes celebrating gender transitions and “Satan smoking Marijuana.”