Today's court ruling weakening discrimination protections for LGBTQ people stands out as extraordinarily strange to me for the simple fact that there was no case. The web designer in question never received a request to create a website for a gay wedding, but instead argued that a hypothetical situation in which she did would violate her rights. I've never really heard of anything like this before— how does she even have standing to sue? Can @radiofreederry or someone with more knowledge of legalese than me elaborate on this?

Melissa Gira Grant, "The Christian Right Is Making Up Wedding Websites to Attack LGBTQ People," The New Republic, 28 June 2023:

In this latest case, there is no website and no wedding—just an argument from an anti-LGBTQ group in search of the court’s favor...

No person has hired Smith to create a wedding website. In fact, Smith has never designed a wedding website, according to her petition to the court. As such, there is no client Smith has told she is rejecting due to her stated religious beliefs that marriage is only allowed between one man and one woman. In the absence of all that, ADF has, instead, fashioned Smith as the victim of an injury that has never occurred.  

So who has hypothetically victimized Smith? A Colorado anti-discrimination law, which, since 2008, has included protections from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. ADF claims Smith’s desire “to bring glory to God by creating unique expression that shares her religious beliefs of creating wedding websites” is thwarted by this law “because she only wants to make websites that comport with her values that same-sex marriage is illegitimate.” Were Smith to get into the wedding website business, the anti-discrimination law “would force me to say things about marriage I disagree with,” Smith wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Times, when her case was argued at the Supreme Court last December...

Can the court rule on thought experiments?