Dressmaker said her "religious beliefs" forced her to discriminate. Now she has to pay the price.

A court in New York rejected a claim last week from a religious clothing retailer that her constitutional rights were violated when she was fined for refusing to sell a wedding jumpsuit to a lesbian woman. She’ll now have to pay $5,000 in damages and a $20,000 fine.

It all started when a lesbian in Missouri saw an ad for a “wedding bridal jumpsuit” being sold by a business in New York City called D. Auxilly NYC LLC, owned by Dominique Galbraith. The woman said she showed her fiancée the ad and the fiancée had “fallen in love” with it.

So she contacted the business by email and asked about buying the jumpsuit and payment options, and during her discussion with Galbraith, she let it slip that she was marrying another woman. That’s when Galbraith said that “she would not be able to make the garment for a same-sex wedding because it would go against her religious beliefs” and that “she also urged [the victim] and her fiancé to reconsider getting married,” according to court documents.

The victim filed a discrimination complaint with the New York State Division of Human Rights since the state of New York bans public accommodations discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Galbraith argued that her religious beliefs required her to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people, an argument that the State Division rejected.

She also argued that the discrimination had not occurred in New York, but in Missouri, since the victim was not physically in New York when the discrimination happened, but that argument was also rejected since the business is located in New York, which is where the work of making the jumpsuit and the transaction would have taken place.

Galbraith said that she wasn’t discriminating against gay people in general but just against the specific event of same-sex weddings, which the State Division didn’t buy either. “Same-sex marriage is ‘inextricably tied to sexual orientation,’” the State Division ruled.

The argument is similar to one that has been used successfully by homophobic business owners elsewhere. They argue that they are not merely refusing to sell a product to a class of people, but that they are refusing to design an artistic or “expressive” object for a same-sex wedding. A lot of ink was spilled arguing this point in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, which involved what may have been a custom cake (although the gay couple in that case never asked for a custom cake), and in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, which involved making wedding websites with words. But this case in New York involves a jumpsuit that was “previously designed and which it had marketed to the public” and a vendor objecting to who will eventually use the product they’re selling, the State Division ruled.

Galbraith appealed, but a five-judge panel from the New York State Appellate Division upheld the State Division’s decision on October 22.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.

Originally published here.