You won’t be shocked to learn that the U.S. Supreme Court’s reputation is in the toilet. A new national poll, conducted in mid-June, found that only 29 percent of Americans – a record low – rate the court favorably…and that was before it ruled against gay people in a fake case infested with fake facts.
Have you wrecked on your own holiday by boning up on the dirty details of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis? At first glance, it just looked like a predictably bigoted ruling from the MAGA-GOP majority (six judges named to the bench by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections). A Colorado woman with a Christian conscience didn’t want to design a gay-wedding website, and last Friday the high court decreed that she should be allowed to play the God card despite a state law which bars all public-serving businesses from discriminating against gays.
OK, we expected that kind of ruling. The Bible licenses bigotry, or something like that. But now we’ve learned, thanks to some intrepid reporting, that the whole case was a fraud.
It turns out that Lorie Smith, the purportedly aggrieved wedding website designer who’d purportedly been asked to design a gay-wedding website, had in truth never designed a wedding website for anybody. And did a gay person contact her and ask that she design a gay-wedding website? Nope. That yarn was concocted out of thin air.
According to Smith’s court papers – this got into the court papers! – back in 2016 she was contacted by a guy identified only as “Stewart.” Supposedly, this “Stewart” emailed her to say he would soon get hitch to his lover, “Mike.” The message explained: “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.”
Well, it’s easy to see how the request from “Stewart” might help her case. It gave her status – in legal parlance, it gave her standing to sue – as a Christian victim. The suit was first filed on Sept. 20, 2016; oh so conveniently, the email from “Stewart” landed in her in-box one day later.
And in early 2017, her lawyers, who work for a Christian hate group called Alliance Defending Freedom, argued in court papers that “Stewart” buttressed her case: “Any claim that Lorie will never receive a request to create a custom website celebrating a same-sex ceremony is no longer legitimate, because Lorie has received such a request.” Lorie then said, in a sworn statement, that the gay-wedding request was “true and accurate.”
Um, no it wasn’t.
Stewart is a real person. But even though his phone number was listed in the court papers, nobody (and certainly not the high court justices’ staffers) ever bothered to call him to vet the information. The reporter who did call him, a few weeks ago, was the first to do so. And guess what the reporter found out:
Stewart had no idea how his name, email account, and phone number got into the court papers. Stewart had no idea who Lorie Smith was. Stewart never requested anything. He lives in California, not Colorado. He wouldn’t need anyone to design him a website, because he is a website designer. And he is straight. He has been married to a woman for 15 years.
“If somebody’s pulled my information…somebody’s falsified that,” he said. “I’m not really sure where that came from. But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.” Nevertheless, Smith’s ADF lawyers, perhaps because they have God on speed dial, are still insisting that the Stewart-and-Mike wedding request was “genuine.”
You have questions. I have questions. Like, what the funk is going on here?
Who pulled Stewart’s name and contact info out of the ether and sent it to Smith, to give her standing as a “victim”? How is it possible that this case made it all the way to the Supreme Court without someone actually vetting the credibility of Lorie Smith’s claim? Because basically what we’ve got here is a fake case (a woman who’d never designed a wedding website seeking to overthrow an anti-discrimination law in advance of ever getting a gay request) based on fake facts (there was no gay request, therefore Smith wasn’t a victim of anything), all of which was nevertheless catnip for six bigoted theocrats who were looking for a juicy opportunity to legislate against gays from the bench.
One would think that all the parties involved – starting with Smith’s lawyers, ending with the theocratic six – are bound by ethical and procedural rules not to make or endorse factual misrepresentations. But the credibility of the high court has eroded to the point where it’s a pipe dream to even pine for accountability. Is this a scandal that cries out for investigation? Yes. Will it happen? Pick a laugh emoji.
Richard Painter, who served as ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, is as disgusted as you surely are. As he lamented yesterday, “This Supreme Court needs an ethics lawyer and an inspector general. If they can’t fill out their own financial disclosure forms correctly, how much credibility do they have when they interpret the Constitution and statutes for the rest of us?”