The gay couple at the center of a lawsuit against a conservative Christian baker for refusing to sell them a wedding cake criticized the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday for restricting LGBTQ rights.

In an opinion piece for USA Today, Charlie Craig and David Mullins reflected on the new decision five years after the couple narrowly lost their case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, before the Supreme Court.

The 2018 ruling against Craig and Mullins left broader questions about discrimination and the First Amendment unresolved.

Its new ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis provided clarity at the expense of gay rights, as the conservative court made it easier for companies to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.

“The Court’s decision allows the rights of a business owner to take precedence over the civil rights of disadvantaged minorities. This opinion promotes supremacy at the expense of equality,” the couple wrote.

As in the Masterpiece case, 303 Creative’s lawsuit arose from the owner of a religious business’s refusal to serve a gay couple.

But in the 303 Creative case, no one was actually hurt. The gay couple was a fictional one. The owner of the website company, Lorie Smith, was simply concerned about the probability She would be asked to create a wedding website for such a client If She started offering wedding website design services.

Craig and Mullins said that was intentional. The right-wing group representing the master baker, the Alliance Defending Freedom, was the same group that defended the web designer.

The couple said the ADF had “constructed the 303 Creative case as a kind of re-enactment” without the emotional, human component they had brought to the case.

“The ADF has learned its lesson: when LGBTQ+ people have the opportunity to demonstrate their humanity in court and in the country, it becomes more difficult for them to paint a distorted, inaccurate and frightening picture of a predatory community that tramples on the rights of religious people,” Craig and Mullins wrote.

David Mullins (left) and Charlie Craig at their home in Denver in 2017.

The court’s ruling on Friday “brings back the fear and sense of alienation we experienced while fighting our case,” they said.

Both cases involved public facilities, meaning businesses that are open to the public. Both cases took place in Colorado, which has a law prohibiting discrimination based on characteristics such as race, gender identity and sexual orientation.

On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that Colorado’s anti-discrimination law violated Smith’s First Amendment rights because her creative work as a web designer could be considered “free speech” and the state would compel her to make statements she disagreed with on religious grounds.

In a sharp dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision opens a sea of ​​troubling possibilities, citing as examples a conservative photographer refusing to photograph an interracial couple or a funeral director refusing to touch the body of a gay man.

“For us, it was never about a cake,” Craig and Mullins wrote. “It was always about fighting homophobia. It was about equality.”

“That is what the Supreme Court is meant to protect. That is the promise of the words engraved on the building itself: ‘Equal justice under the law.'”

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