“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. Not until February 2017 did ADF include the text of the “Stewart” inquiry and argue its relevance to the case. Rather, ADF merely stated that it was not necessary for Smith to have received an inquiry in order to challenge the law over her feared consequences of denying services to a same-sex couple. The following month, in its response, ADF did not mention the September 2016 “Stewart” inquiry to refute the defense’s claims. (His phone number was, after all, right there.) In a motion filed by the defense on October 19, 2016, arguing that the case should be dismissed, they state that Smith has received no actual inquiries for services and therefore has suffered no injury.
It is unclear exactly when-or if-the inquiry from “Stewart” was examined and verified in the course of this legal battle. (In fact, her website six months prior to the lawsuit being filed in 2016 does not include any of the Christian messaging that it did shortly afterward and today, archived versions of the site show.) The initial lawsuit did not mention the “Stewart” inquiry, which was submitted to Smith’s website on September 21, according to the date-stamp shown in later court filings, indicating that she received it the day after the suit was originally filed. Up to this point, Smith had never designed any wedding website. Smith and ADF filed the case on September 20 of that year, asking the court to enjoin the state anti-discrimination law so that Smith could begin offering her wedding website design services to straight couples only. When Smith and her attorneys, the Christian right group Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, brought this case for the first time, it was to the United States District Court in Colorado in 2016, and they lost. Here is what we know-though, to be frank, I do not know what we have learned from this yearslong mystery, other than it looks like Smith and her attorneys have, perhaps unwittingly, invented a gay couple in need of a wedding website in a case in which they argue that same-sex marriages are “ false.”
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