A United States District Court in Minnesota ruled against Angel and Carl Larsen this week, saying that their plan to expand their film business to include straight weddings – but not weddings of same-sex couples – was illegal discrimination.
The case started last December when the Larsens expanded their film business, Telescope Media Group, to include filming weddings, just so that they could challenge Minnesota’s anti-discrimination law. They immediately filed suit against the state’s attorney general and commissioner of human rights, saying that their First Amendment rights were violated by the state ban on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
The Larsens said on their website that they founded their company to “magnify Christ like a telescope.” They do not want to film weddings of people of the same sex, because of their religious belief in “the historic, biblically orthodox definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.”
They said that they would be consistent in their policy of only filming events they support, and included examples of events that they would also refuse, like the “destruction of unborn children.”
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The judge dismissed the suit, saying that their plan was “conduct akin to a ‘White Applicants Only’ sign that may be prohibited without implicating the First Amendment.”
“Posting language on a website telling potential customers that a business will discriminate based on sexual orientation is part of the act of sexual orientation discrimination itself.”
The suit is similar to ones that bakers have been bringing in order to nullify anti discrimination laws in that it argued that their job is actually a form of creative expression, so forcing those workers to follow anti discrimination laws violates their free speech rights. Courts, though, generally do not consider any job that involves any creativity to be a form of artistic expression, since by that logic a lunch counter owner could say that their omelettes are a speech act and they can’t be forced to serve people of all races.
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