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303 CREATIVE LLC v. ELENIS 

Syllabus 

will be “customized and tailored” through close collaboration with in-
dividual  couples,  and  will  “express  Ms.  Smith’s  and  303  Creative’s
message celebrating and promoting” her view of marriage; viewers of
Ms. Smith’s websites “will know that the websites are her original art-
work;” and “[t]here are numerous companies in the State of Colorado
and across the nation that offer custom website design services.”

Ultimately, the district court held that Ms. Smith was not entitled 

to the injunction she sought, and the Tenth Circuit affirmed. 

Held: The  First  Amendment  prohibits  Colorado  from  forcing  a  website 
designer to create expressive designs speaking messages with which 
the designer disagrees.  Pp. 6–26. 

(a) The  framers  designed  the  Free  Speech  Clause  of  the  First
Amendment to protect the “freedom to think as you will and to speak 
as you think.”  Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U. S. 640, 660–661 
(internal quotation marks omitted).  The freedom to speak is among 
our inalienable rights.  The freedom of thought and speech is “indis-
pensable  to  the  discovery  and  spread  of  political  truth.”    Whitney  v. 
California,  274  U. S.  357,  375  (Brandeis,  J.,  concurring).    For  these 
reasons, “[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” 
West Virginia Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U. S. 624, 642, it is the prin-
ciple that the government may not interfere with “an uninhibited mar-
ketplace of ideas,” McCullen v.  Coakley, 573 U. S. 464, 476 (internal 
quotation marks omitted).

This  Court  has  previously  faced  cases  where  governments  have 
sought  to  test  these  foundational  principles.    In  Barnette,  the  Court 
held that the State of West Virginia’s efforts to compel schoolchildren
to  salute  the  Nation’s  flag  and  recite  the  Pledge  of  Allegiance  “in-
vad[ed] the sphere of intellect and spirit which it is the purpose of the
First Amendment . . . to reserve from all official control.”  319 U. S., at 
642.  State authorities had “transcend[ed] constitutional limitations on 
their  powers.”    319  U. S.,  at  642.    In  Hurley  v.  Irish-American  Gay, 
Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., 515 U. S. 557, the Court 
held that Massachusetts’s public accommodations statute could not be 
used to force veterans organizing a parade in Boston to include a group 
of gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals because the parade was pro-
tected speech, and requiring the veterans to include voices they wished 
to exclude would impermissibly require them to “alter the expressive 
content of their parade.”  Id., at 572–573.  And in Boy Scouts of America 
v. Dale, when the Boy Scouts sought to exclude assistant scoutmaster 
James  Dale  from  membership  after  learning  he  was  gay,  the  Court 
held the Boy Scouts to be “an expressive association” entitled to First 
Amendment protection.  530 U. S., at 656.  The Court found that forc-
ing the Scouts to include Mr. Dale would undoubtedly “interfere with 
[its] choice not to propound a point of view contrary to its beliefs.”  Id.,