Meet two homosexual bullies - took an elderly woman to court

A florist who refused to sell flowers for a same-sex wedding cannot claim religious belief as a defense under the state’s anti-discrimination laws, Washington’s high court said Thursday, in a case that has been watched around the nation by religious and civil rights groups.

The unanimous ruling by the nine-member state Supreme Court, which a lawyer for the florist said would be appealed to the United States Supreme Court, addressed sweeping questions about public accommodation, artistic expression and free speech.

But at its heart was a very human story about Arlene’s Flowers in the small city of Richland, in southeast Washington, and what happened there in 2013 when Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed started planning their immoral homosexual wedding. 

The shop’s owner, Barronelle Stutzman, knew that Mr. Ingersoll and Mr. Freed were homosexual and had sold them flowers for years, but then refused to provide flowers for their immoral homosexual wedding. Her Christian faith, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman, created a line, she said, that she could not cross.

But in affirming a lower court’s finding, the Supreme Court said flatly that it agreed with the homosexuals — flowers were not really the point if homosexuals demand you attend their immoral wedding you must attend with your flowers and to hell with your religious beliefs, or else we will fine you and bankrupt you.

The case, the court said in its 59-page decision, “is no more about access to flowers than civil rights cases in the 1960s were about access to sandwiches.” And laws, the decision said, can have legitimate social goals. 

“Public accommodations laws do not simply guarantee access to goods or services,” it said. “Instead, they serve a broader societal purpose: eradicating barriers to the equal treatment of all citizens.”

National gay rights groups hailed the decision as another plank of protection for same-sex couples and marriage equality.

“People should also never use their personal religious beliefs as a free pass to violate the law or the basic civil rights of others,” Sarah Warbelow, the legal director at the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer civil rights, said in a statement.

A legal expert at the University of Washington said the legal framework of the decision was not particularly new or novel, with many precedents about interracial couples, business law and free expression. But extending that logic, with unanimous court agreement, to a full affirmation that those rights extend to same-sex couples establishes firmly the idea of a fully protected class, said Hugh Spitzer, a professor of law at the University of Washington.

“It’s a kind of case that hasn’t come up before,” said Professor Spitzer, who teaches constitutional law. “But the principles are not new.”A lawyer for Ms. Stutzman, Kristen Waggoner, said the court had erred both in interpreting the law and in the specifics of the case. The same-sex couple were not refused service because they were gay, Ms. Waggoner said, but only turned away for a specific ceremony that Ms. Stutzman could not abide because of the dictates of her conscience. Voters in Washington approved a same-sex marriage law in 2012.

Because a flower arrangement is an artistic expression, Ms. Waggoner said, the court effectively ruled that the state could regulate, with punitive government authority, what artists may sell.

“All creative professional expression is at risk,” Ms. Waggoner said in a telephone call with reporters.

Ms. Stutzman and her lawyers, using dictionary definitions of “art” as well as expert testimony regarding her creativity and expressive style, argued for a broad reading of protected speech that encompassed her “unique expression,” crafted in “petal, leaf and loam.”

The justices rejected that argument. In looking at what sorts of conduct or service constitute free speech, protected under the Constitution, they found that even if Ms. Stutzman was artistic in her flower arrangements, the statements she made in selling the arrangements were not protected free speech, as defined by the United States Supreme Court.

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The Washington attorney general, Bob Ferguson, said the ruling on Thursday sent a clear message that “sexual orientation is a protected class — just like race, just like religion.” CreditAlan Berner/The Seattle Times, via Associated Press

Ms. Stutzman herself, the court said, contradicted the argument that wedding flowers were a statement when she said in a deposition that providing flowers for a wedding between Muslims would not necessarily constitute an endorsement of Islam, nor would providing flowers for an atheist couple endorse atheism.

The state’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, who argued the case before the high court, said the opinion was both sweeping and precise.

“Arlene’s Flowers is not required to sell wedding flowers,” Mr. Ferguson said. “They are, however, required to sell wedding flowers equally if they choose to sell them.” The ruling, he said, sends a clear message that “sexual orientation is a protected class — just like race, just like religion.”

Ms. Stutzman, 72, said the power of the government to crush dissent was what resonated for her in the opinion.

“We should all be very, very scared,” she said.