After the Supreme Court upheld Christian graphic designer Lorie Smith's legal challenge to Colorado's anti-discrimination law last week, the media seized on reports that a customer requesting a same-sex wedding mentioned in court filings appeared to be fake.
"The revelation has led to complaints on social media that the case should never have made it as far as the Supreme Court, with many arguing that Smith didn't have legal standing to bring the case if there weren't any customers seeking her services," an NBC News article explained.
Legal experts however, shot down these arguments in NBC's report.
"Though I think the [Supreme Court] opinion is misguided in many ways, I do think she has standing," Carolyn Shapiro, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law said.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Smith on Friday. She sued the state over its anti-discrimination law that prohibited businesses providing sales or other accommodations to the public from denying service based on a customer's sexual orientation. Smith aspires to create wedding websites for customers, but opposed the law which would potentially require her to design same-sex wedding websites.
"She’s saying I want to do something that's definitely against the law in Colorado. I think that’s probably enough for a pre-enforcement challenge," Shapiro added to NBC.
Civil rights attorney Jonathan Miller agreed, telling the outlet, "pre-enforcement review is generally good" and "needed to ensure unconstitutional laws don't go into effect." However, Miller believed the fake customer raised "serious questions about the facts and record in this case."
Other attorneys argued to NBC that the customer was irrelevant to the case, because they were not mentioned in the majority opinion or dissent, and the request was sent after Smith's complaint against the state was filed and picked up by the media.
"This whole insinuation makes no sense at all," conservative attorney Ed Whelan told NBC.
"Every justice agreed" Smith had the legal standing to bring her case, he added.
Smith's attorney Kristen Waggoner of Alliance Defending Freedom also took to Twitter to blast the idea that Smith had no legal standing as a "desperate, bad faith attempt to undermine the ruling that protects speech for everyone."
Biden administration officials and media reports over the weekend tried to cast doubt on Smith's legal standing after the revelation was first reported by The New Republic.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg suggested the bogus customer proved the court's First Amendment argument had no merit.
"The fact that this was relief from a situation that may have never happened in the first place tells you everything you need to know about this agenda to use every instrument of government, courts and legislatures, to claw back at these rights for people who were just trying to go about their lives and just trying to be treated equally by businesses and by the government," he said Sunday on CNN.
The Associated Press also questioned this in their report Tuesday, writing, "The revelation has raised questions about how Lorie Smith’s case was allowed to proceed all the way to the nation’s highest court with such an apparent misrepresentation and whether the state of Colorado, which lost the case last week, has any legal recourse."
However, the AP clarified it was "highly unlikely" Smith's case would be impacted by the revelation. "The would-be customer’s request was not the basis for Smith’s original lawsuit, nor was it cited by the high court as the reason for ruling in her favor," they wrote.
Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the majority opinion in the decision, writing that Colorado's anti-discrimination law was an attempt to coerce individuals to betray their conscience.
"But tolerance, not coercion, is our Nation’s answer. The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands. Because Colorado seeks to deny that promise, the judgment is reversed," he concluded.
Fox News' Brianna Herlihy and Ronn Blitzer contributed to this report.
