First I’d like to thank Chief “Justice” John Roberts and his Merry Band of Grifting Garbage for so irrefutably proving correct my opinion that the Roberts court is the worst Supreme Court since the Taney Court, which means it’s the worst SCOTUS of all time. Way to knock it out of the park with the affirmative action decision, guys.

One of the decisions left to be released is 303 Creative v. Elenis, the case of the website designer who doesn’t want to have to make wedding websites for same sex couples even though her company wasn’t in the wedding industry and had never been approached by a same sex couple when the litigation first began. Her argument is that an artist so she should not be forced to compromise her First Amendment rights. And then in 2017, conveniently as the litigation was proceeding, she did receive a request for a same sex wedding website.

Today Melissa Gira Grant at The New Republic published a piece with this historical background of the case itself:

Not until February 2017 did ADF include the text of the “Stewart” inquiry and argue its relevance to the case. “Notably, 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,” the group wrote. “Even though she is not currently in the wedding industry, Lorie received an email inquiry on September 21, 2016.” Smith elaborated in a sworn statement that she “received a request through the ‘contact’ webpage on my website from a person named, ‘Stewart,’ reference number 9741406, to create graphic designs for invitations and other materials for a same-sex wedding (‘same-sex wedding request’).” She added that a “true and accurate copy” of the “same-sex wedding request” would be submitted with the statement. Why it took until possibly February 2017 to introduce the inquiry is not clear.

Ah, well, ok then this is a real case after all since now there was a request, right? Not so fast.

From that same article:

This week, I decided to call Stewart and ask him about his inquiry…It took just a few minutes to reach him. I assumed at least some reporters over the years had contacted him about his website inquiry to 303 Creative—his contact information wasn’t redacted in the filing. But my call, he said, was “the very first time I’ve heard of it.”

Yes, that was his name, phone number, email address, and website on the inquiry form. But he never sent this form, he said, and at the time it was sent, he was married to a woman. “If somebody’s pulled my information, as some kind of supporting information or documentation, somebody’s falsified that,” Stewart explained. (Stewart’s last name is not included in the filing, so we will be referring to him by his first name throughout this story.)

“I wouldn’t want anybody to … make me a wedding website?” he continued, sounding a bit puzzled but good-natured about the whole thing. “I’m married, I have a child—I’m not really sure where that came from? But somebody’s using false information in a Supreme Court filing document.”

Is there a better metaphor for this shitty, squalid, half-assed iteration of SCOTUS than The Case of the Website That Wasn’t? This stupid panic over LGBTQ people, which is based in lies, has led to the Supreme Court and the entire stupid bigoted case is now being supported by a lie invented LATER to shore up an especially glaring defect in the case.

And of course none of this will matter because Justice Alito already told us in the leaked Dobbs decision—the law is whatever the right wing winguts on the Court say it is, nothing more and nothing less. Or to quote that famed legal mind Humpty-Dumpty (via Lewis Carroll)

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

The bigots and haters are the masters of the current Supreme Court. It’s time for some Bowie: