(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
The Mysterious Case of the Fake Gay Marriage Website, the Real Straight Man, and the Supreme Court [1]
['Melissa Gira Grant', 'Jason Kyle Howard', 'Michael Tomasky', 'Pat Garofalo', 'Charlotte Kilpatrick', 'Grace Segers']
Date: 2023-06-29
I don’t live inside Stewart’s computer—there’s a chance that he’s not telling me the whole story; that this is some elaborate prank he pulled years ago and doesn’t want to confess to now. But if he’s telling the truth—that this request was done completely without his knowledge—I don’t have any answers for him. None of this makes sense to me. And neither Lorie Smith nor ADF have responded to my inquiries. As late as 2020, ADF was maintaining that Stewart’s was a genuine inquiry. Speaking to “requests” for Smith’s services in a filing to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, their attorneys wrote, “Lorie already received one. A prospective customer named ‘Stewart’ contacted Lorie through her webpage, asking about custom graphics and a website to celebrate his wedding to his fiancé, ‘Mike.’”
Maybe it should not be a surprise, though, that this strange fake “request” popped up in a case in which the plaintiff’s main argument rested on the claim that someday, out there, a same-sex couple would want her to design a wedding website. The closest thing Smith had to an actual inquiry—the nonwedding of Stewart and Mike—arrived within 24 hours of her having filed a suit in which said inquiry would be potentially a helpful piece of supporting evidence. The inquiry floats through the filings only later, and still it remains. Despite the district court raising doubts about it representing a genuine inquiry from two men getting married—and the court didn’t even raise the real doubt that the couple does not exist—it is now part of the case history, a bit of fan fiction joining the other phantom gays the case invokes. ADF made no mention of Stewart and Mike specifically in their arguments before the Supreme Court this session, but they don’t need to: Their entire case, after all, is built around the idea of gay people doing something that they have not yet done, nor ever will do.
Despite its flimsiness, the “Stewart” inquiry remains there in the 303 Creative court filings submitted to the Supreme Court, part of a raft of exhibits including mock-ups of websites Smith claims she was prevented from making by Colorado’s law protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation. “I disagree with this, in the strongest possible terms,” Stewart told me. “I couldn’t disagree with her stance more.” And while he wants nothing to do with the spotlight of this case, he does want it to be known: He never asked for a website, let alone what may result.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/173987/mysterious-case-fake-gay-marriage-website-real-straight-man-supreme-court
Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/
