Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-476_c185.pdf
Page Number: 5

Cite as:  600 U. S. ____ (2023) 

5 

Syllabus 

578; Dale, 530 U. S., at 659.  As in those cases, when Colorado’s public
accommodations  law  and  the  Constitution  collide,  there  can  be  no 
question which must prevail.  U. S. Const. Art. VI, §2.

As the Tenth Circuit saw it, Colorado has a compelling interest in 
ensuring “equal access to publicly available goods and services,” and 
no option short of coercing speech from Ms. Smith can satisfy that in-
terest because she plans to offer “unique services” that are, “by defini-
tion, unavailable elsewhere.”  6 F. 4th, at 1179–1180 (internal quota-
tion marks omitted).  In some sense, of course, her voice is unique; so 
is everyone’s.  But that hardly means a State may coopt an individual’s
voice for its own purposes.  The speaker in Hurley had an “enviable” 
outlet  for  speech,  and  the  Boy  Scouts  in  Dale  offered  an  arguably 
unique  experience,  but  in  both  cases  this  Court  held  that  the  State 
could not use its public accommodations statute to deny a speaker the
right “to choose the content of his own message.”  Hurley, 515 U. S., at 
573; see Dale, 530 U. S., at 650–656.  A rule otherwise would conscript
any unique voice to disseminate the government’s preferred messages
in violation of the First Amendment.  Pp. 9–15.

(c) Colorado now seems to acknowledge that the First Amendment 
does prohibit it from coercing Ms. Smith to create websites expressing 
any message with which she disagrees.  Alternatively, Colorado con-
tends, Ms. Smith must simply provide the same commercial product to 
all, which she can do by repurposing websites celebrating marriages
she does endorse for marriages she does not.  Colorado’s theory rests 
on a belief that this case does not implicate pure speech, but rather the 
sale of an ordinary commercial product, and that any burden on Ms. 
Smith’s  speech  is  purely  “incidental.”    On  the  State’s  telling,  then, 
speech more or less vanishes from the picture—and, with it, any need
for First Amendment scrutiny. Colorado’s alternative theory, however,
does not sit easily with its stipulation that Ms. Smith does not seek to 
sell an ordinary commercial good but intends to create “customized and
tailored” expressive speech for each couple “to celebrate and promote
the couple’s wedding and unique love story.”  Colorado seeks to compel 
just the sort of speech that it tacitly concedes lies beyond its reach.  

The State stresses that Ms. Smith offers her speech for pay and does 
so  through  303  Creative  LLC,  a  company  in  which  she  is  “the  sole 
member-owner.”  But many of the world’s great works of literature and 
art were created with an expectation of compensation.  And speakers
do not shed their First Amendment protections by employing the cor-
porate form to disseminate their speech.  Colorado urges the Court to 
look  at  the  reason  Ms.  Smith  refuses  to  offer  the  speech  it  seeks  to 
compel, and it claims that the reason is that she objects to the “pro-
tected characteristics” of certain customers.  But the parties’ stipula-