Forced hospitality

The U.S. Supreme Court last week denied a Catholic bed-and-breakfast owner’s plea for due process following a lower court’s ruling that her private home in Hawaii is actually a public hotel.

Phyllis Young, a former realtor who understood the relevant laws, rented a condominium and rooms in her home in Honolulu, marketed as the Aloha Bed & Breakfast, to help pay the mortgage after her husband was forced to take early retirement for medical reasons. She let anyone who was interested reserve the condominium, but for the three rooms in her home, she was more selective. Young lived in a single-family home with four bedrooms, and any renters would share the kitchen and dining room. The applicable laws included a clause called “Mrs. Murphy’s exemption” that treated Young’s short-term renters as roommates, not tenants.

“Federal and state law has had, for decades, the requirement that as long as it’s fewer than five rooms, you are permitted to choose who you want to be roommates with,” Young’s lawyer, J. James Hochberg, told me.

In 2007, a woman contacted Young requesting a single room and bed for her and her lesbian partner. Young, a committed Catholic, politely declined because of her religious beliefs about marriage and sexuality. The couple, Taeko Bufford and Diane Cervelli, filed a complaint with the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission, which told Young she and her husband would have to pay $10,000 to each of the women and post signs inside and outside their own home saying they would no longer discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Young turned down the settlement, and the couple sued. Young received notice of the suit, accompanied by news cameras, days before Christmas 2012.

The judge ruled Young was violating nondiscrimination rules in public accommodations law, but he acknowledged he could be wrong and invited Young to appeal. On appeal Young’s lawyers argued that the public accommodation law didn’t apply to her private home because of Mrs. Murphy’s exemption. The appellate court ruled against Young in 2018, saying that a renter had to stay for more than 30 days before the exemption kicked in—language that was not and never had been in the law, Hochberg said.

Young’s lawyers appealed again, arguing that the ruling violated the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says the law must be clear and citizens must be aware of their obligations. The Hawaii Supreme Court rejected the appeal last year, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case last week.

“The intermediate court of appeals essentially rewrote the law and applied it retroactively to her,” Hochberg said. “We now have a final decision that Phyllis Young’s house—in a subdivision with houses all around it, where the zoning does not permit hotels—her house is now a public accommodation under the law. It’s no longer her renting rooms in the home that she lives in, which is just absurd, but that’s the legal status of her property.”