Rejoice! This is a great day for justice and the rule of law. In a six to three ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars discrimination against LGBTQ persons.
Justices Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinon. He was joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomeyor, and Kagan.
The full opinion may be found here.
Here are the first two paragrahs:
Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them. In our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There, in Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. 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.Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the Act’s consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to
its benefit.
Rejoice!
© Andrew Whiteman 2020
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Whiteman Law Firm handles cases involving employment law under federal and state statutes. Please contact us for more information.