Landmark SCOTUS ruling backs rights for LGBT workers
In a major win for LGBT workers, the US Supreme Court has ruled that gay, lesbian and transgender employees are protected by federal civil rights laws.
Republican appointees Justices Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts joined the court’s liberal justices, resulting in a 6-3 ruling issued yesterday, June 15.
Under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, discrimination on the basis of “race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin” is banned. Yesterday’s ruling confirmed that the ban on “sex” discrimination covered gay, lesbian and transgender people.
The issue came to the court in three different cases, each involving an employer allegedly firing a long-time employee simply for being homosexual or transgender.
Gorsuch, who was nominated to the court by President Donald Trump, delivered the majority opinion. It comes five years after the Supreme Court legalised same-sex marriage.
“The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,” said Gorsuch.
He added that while those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result, the “limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands”.
The decision was a defeat for the Trump administration, which had argued that Title VII did not protect gay and transgender people. Last week, the administration announced it will roll back President Barack Obama-era healthcare protections for transgender patients.
Gorsuch added: “The statute’s message for our cases is equally simple and momentous: An individual’s homosexuality or transgender status is not relevant to employment decisions. That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
The majority rejected the employers’ arguments that Congress had considered several proposals to add sexual orientation to Title VII’s list of protected characteristics, but no such amendment has become law.
“All we can know for certain is that speculation about why a later Congress declined to adopt new legislation offers a ‘particularly dangerous’ basis on which to rest an interpretation of an existing law a different and earlier Congress did adopt,” said Gorsuch in response.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh dissented from the decision.
Alito, in a dissent joined by Thomas, said: “There is only one word for what the court has done today: legislation. The document that the court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive.”
He went on to add that a “more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall” and that the court’s attempt to convince “readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute is preposterous”.
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