US Supreme Court sides with Christian graphic designer who refused to create same-sex wedding website

As an aside, and a long-time bug bear, it's also piss-poor journalism to use the euphemism "Christian" when what is meant is "right-wing evangelical" and excluding the actual majority of moderate, non-batshit members of mainline denominations.

A long-time bug beat of mine is when posters use ‘evangelical’ to mean republican and ignoring the fact that a lot of evangelical churches (especially in the UK) are left wing.

Sexual orientation is not a protected class in the US. As it has gone through the Supreme Court it sets precedent for other businesses to refuse to accept members of the LGBTQ community as clients. A doctor could refuse to treat someone with an STI as they contracted it via gay sex, an obstetrician could refuse to treat a lesbian who is pregnant via IVF or artificial insemination as they don't agree with how the baby will be brought up. In a city there are other options for providers, in rural areas it is very different. There could be one dentist or doctor for 50 miles.

This has serious ramifications.

This is a piss-poor article that doesn't mention the crucial fact about this case, which is that nobody actually asked this person to create a same-sex wedding website. This entire proceeding was about a made-up hypothetical case, and I gather it's extremely unusual for SCOTUS to accept to hear something like this. Basically, the whole thing was engineered by "conservative" legal strategists because bona fide previous cases hadn't yielded quite the desired results (reasoning in the judgment too narrow for their purposes, etc.)

As an aside, and a long-time bug bear, it's also piss-poor journalism to use the euphemism "Christian" when what is meant is "right-wing evangelical" and excluding the actual majority of moderate, non-batshit members of mainline denominations. It's a colonialism use of language that sadly the US media have swallowed hook, line and sinker, but I'm really disappointed to see it used by a British site which probably cut and pasted the article wholesale.

I'm all for people sometimes being able to refuse to be involved in what they see as unethical activity.

But say, I would be a lot less happy about a company that owned a lot of advertising billboards being able to pick and choose which political parties it wanted to work with.

I think this judgment is correct. A website isn't an essential service and there must be other options. You can design your own website.
If she was refusing to sell them a computer or book a restaurant just because they were homosexual, that would be different. But this involves her personally.

Is this essentially any different to the wedding cake ruling in Northern Ireland?

I'm homosexual. I'm fine with people choosing whether or not they want to involve themselves in or celebrate homosexuality. Capacity for respecting others' beliefs intact and working. There's then plenty of market for graphic designers who do don't find homosexuality conflicts with their beliefs.

I certainly wouldn't accept a contract requiring me to celebrate child transition or excluding women from women's spaces to permit men to have more choice for example.