A federal appeals court has ruled against a web designer who sued to overturn Colorado's anti-discrimination law on the grounds that it violated her First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

In a July 26 ruling, a three-judge panel of the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver on Monday denied Lorie Smith's appeal of a District Court ruling against her suit.

In Smith's 2016 lawsuit, she claimed that Colorado's law would compel her to create wedding websites for same-sex couples against the teaching of her Christian religion. She was represented in court by the anti-LGBTQ Alliance Defending Freedom.

"The government should never force creative professionals to promote a message or cause with which they disagree. That is quintessential free speech and artistic freedom," the group's senior counsel, John Bursch, said in a statement.

Lambda Legal, a group that fights for the civil rights of LGBTQ people, had submitted a brief supporting the Colorado law.

"This really isn't about cake or websites or flowers," Lambda Legal senior counsel Jennifer C. Pizer said in a statement. "It's about protecting LGBTQ people and their families from being subjected to slammed doors, service refusals, and public humiliation in countless places — from fertility clinics to funeral homes and everywhere in between."

Colorado Solicitor General Eric Olson, arguing in favor of his state's law, questioned whether Smith even had standing to sue, since she had not started offering wedding websites yet.

The 10th Circuit's three-judge panel voted 2-1 that Colorado had a compelling interest in protecting the "dignity interests" of members of marginalized groups through the law.

Judge Mark Beck Briscoe wrote in the majority opinion that "we must also consider the grave harms caused when public accommodations discriminate on the basis of race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. Combatting such discrimination is, like individual autonomy, 'essential' to our democratic ideals."

The anti-discrimination law is the same one at issue in the case of Colorado baker Jack Phillips that was decided in 2018 by the US Supreme Court.

In that case, the high court decided the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had acted with anti-religious bias against Phillips after he refused to bake a cake for two men who were getting married. But the justices did not rule on the larger issue of whether a business can invoke religious objections to refuse service to LGBTQ people.

In 2019, a three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals found — by a 2-1 vote — that two Christian filmmakers did not violate Minnesota's anti-discrimination law when they refused to make a same-sex wedding video because videos are a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.