NEWS FLASH!… Beep, beep, beep… Supreme Court...

...Rules in our favor, we are covered under “sex” in the Civil Rights Act Title VII !!! 

And most like Title IX also.

Supreme Court rules existing civil rights law protects LGBT workers

The decision said Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate because of a person's sex, also covers sexual orientation and transgender status.

NBC News

By Pete Williams

June 15, 2020

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that existing federal law forbids job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and transgender status, a major victory for advocates of gay rights — and a surprising one from an increasingly conservative court.

In decisions on two separate cases, the court said Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate because of a person's sex, among other factors, also covers sexual orientation and transgender status. It upheld rulings from lower courts that said discrimination based on those factors was a form of sex discrimination.

[…]

The Trump administration had urged the court to rule that Title VII does not cover cases like those, in a reversal from the position the government took during the Obama administration.

CBS News reported…

The court's 6-3 ruling extends the scope of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin and religion, to include LGBTQ people. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, who authored the majority's opinion, joined the liberal wing of the bench in ruling that "an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII."

"Judges are not free to overlook plain statutory commands on the strength of nothing more than suppositions about intentions or guesswork about expectations," Gorsuch wrote. "In Title VII, Congress adopted broad language making it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee's sex when deciding to fire that employee. We do not hesitate to recognize today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law."

And Justice Neil Gorsuch is a Trump appointee. I bet you Trump will be in a tizzy over this “defection.”

The third legal battle before the justices raised the question of whether Title VII prohibits discrimination based on gender identity.

At the center of the case is Aimee Stephens, a transgender woman, who was fired from R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes in Michigan after she told her employer in 2013 she suffered from gender dysphoria and would dress as a woman at work. Stephens died in May.

Let us remember Aimee Stephens and Donald Zarda who brought these cases forward, it is sad that she is not here with us now to see this victory.

In a dissenting opinion on Monday, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, accused the majority of legislating from the bench and likened the opinion to "a pirate ship" that "sails under a textualist flag."

"There is only one word for what the Court has done today: legislation," he wrote. "The document that the Court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive."

Ah… it seems like the it is okay for conservative to legislate from the bench but when a ruling goes against them all of sudden legislating from the bench.

This case has it roots in a Supreme Court ruling that sex also includes sex stereotyping (Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins 1989) and the court case that I liked was Schroer v. Billington case where the judge said…

Imagine that an employee is fired because she converts from Christianity to Judaism. Imagine too that her employer testifies that he harbors no bias toward either Christians or Jews but only "converts." That would be a clear case of discrimination "because of religion." No court would take seriously the notion that "converts" are not covered by the statute. Discrimination "because of religion" easily encompasses discrimination because of a change of religion. But in cases where the plaintiff has changed her sex, and faces discrimination because of the decision to  stop presenting as a man and to start appearing as a woman, courts have traditionally carved such persons out of the statute by concluding that "transsexuality" is unprotected by Title VII. In other words, courts have allowed their focus on the label "transsexual" to blind them to the statutory language itself.

Fox News wrote this about the decision…

The court justified their inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity under Title VII by focusing on the law’s language, which prohibits discrimination “because of” sex, stating that as long as sex is a factor the discrimination, that is enough to trigger Title VII.

The majority goes on to use a hypothetical where an employer has two workers who are attracted to men, but one is a man and the other is a woman, stating that firing the man for being gay would be discriminating against him because of his sex because he has the same preference as the female employee. The court similarly discussed a potential situation where two workers identified as female but one was identified as male at birth and the other female.

"[T]he individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision," the court said about such situations.

Justice Samuel Alito said the majority went too far, calling the decision "legislation," in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

"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," Alito wrote.

Alito noted that the majority opinion "no doubt arises from humane and generous impulses," acknowledging the desire to treat gay, lesbian, and transgender people "with the dignity, consideration, and fairness that everyone deserves," but said the court's role "is limited to saying what the law is," not adding to it.

[…]

"Notwithstanding my concern about the Court’s transgression of the Constitution’s separation of powers, it is appropriate to acknowledge the important victory achieved today by gay and lesbian Americans," Kavanaugh wrote. "Millions of gay and lesbian Americans have worked hard for many decades to achieve equal treatment in fact and in law. They have exhibited extraordinary vision, tenacity, and grit—battling often steep odds in the legislative and judicial arenas, not to mention in their daily lives. They have advanced powerful policy arguments and can take pride in today’s result."

The Trump administration has been trying to narrowly define "sex" as what is between your legs but the court is having none of this.

 

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I think will have a major impact on the Soule v. Connecticut Association of Schools case now before the Federal Court here in Connecticut where three student women athletes are suing the CAS and the towns for allowing trans female student athletes to compete in on women’s teams.

My guess is that the judge in the case will throw out the case and that the Alliance Defending Freedom will appeal the case all the way to the Supreme Court again.

As for U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights telling Connecticut that they are going to cut funding to the state, I hope the state tells Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to go and pound sand. 

Update 1:00 PM added Donald Zarda name and Fox News