Page:303 Creative LLC v. Elenis.pdf/63

Rh Second, the majority completely ignores the categorical nature of the exemption claimed by petitioners. Petitioners maintain, as they have throughout this litigation, that they will refuse to create any wedding website for a same-sex couple. Even an announcement of the time and place of a wedding (similar to the majority’s example from FAIR) abridges petitioners’ freedom of speech, they claim, because “the announcement of the wedding itself is a concept that [Smith] believes to be false.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 41. Indeed, petitioners here concede that if a same-sex couple came across an opposite-sex wedding website created by the company and requested an identical website, with only the names and date of the wedding changed, petitioners would refuse. Id., at 37–38. That is status-based discrimination, plain and simple.

Oblivious to this fact, the majority insists that petitioners discriminate based on message, not status. The company, says the majority, will not sell same-sex wedding websites to anyone. It will sell only opposite-sex wedding websites; that is its service. Petitioners, however, “cannot define their service as ‘opposite-sex wedding [websites]’ any more than a hotel can recast its services as ‘whites-only lodgings.’ ” Telescope Media Group v. Lucero,