A Tale Of Two Articles

Two newspapers are poles opposite; the Washington Examiners a far right newspaper verses the Advocate a LGBTQ+ newspaper. First the Examiners.

Texas attorney general sues Biden over LGBT workplace mandates
By Luke Gentile
September 21, 2021


Texas is suing President Joe Biden's administration over new federal efforts to force businesses to recognize gay and transgender people's bathroom and pronoun preferences.

In a suit filed Monday in the Northern District of Texas federal court, state Attorney General Ken Paxton charged that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission infringed on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it recently added new language.

In issuing a technical assistance document to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton, the EEOC mandated that individuals be permitted to use the bathroom of their choosing and deemed "misgendering" via pronouns as harassment under certain conditions. The original ruling in the case banned workplace discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Some of their objections are,

In addition to Title VII, Paxton argued the administration violated the First Amendment, the 11th Amendment, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

"States should be able to choose protection of privacy for their employers over subjective views of gender, and this illegal guidance puts many women and children at risk. Once again I’m suing The Biden Administration," Paxton posted to Twitter. "See you in court."

Now lets look at the Advocate,

Texas Seeks Right to Discriminate Against Trans People
Trudy Ring
Thu, September 23, 2021


The state of Texas is suing President Joe Biden’s administration over its guidance on treatment of transgender people in the workplace, calling the guidance a “radical attempt at social change.”

The suit, filed by anti-LGBTQ+ Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, particularly objects to the administration’s calls for employers to allow trans workers to use the restrooms and changing rooms comporting with their gender identity and to address these workers by their preferred names and pronouns.
[…]
Requiring that state employees use their trans colleagues’ preferred names and pronouns “would cause Texas to violate its employees’ free speech rights,” the suit continues. It claims that these pronouns are “based on subjective gender identity rather than biological sex.” In general, the suit says, the EEOC guidance obligates employers “to treat biological men as women and treat biological women as men.”
[…]
Paxton and other Texas state officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (all Republicans), are well known for their hostility to LGBTQ+ equality. Before the Supreme Court heard the Bostock case, Paxton and several other states’ attorneys general filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the court to find that sex discrimination did not include discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. When Barack Obama was president, Paxton sued his administration over guidance on equal treatment of transgender youth in schools and a ban on anti-trans discrimination in health care.

It might be hard to win pronouns because of the First Amendment but preferred could be easier to win because people use preferred names all the time, suppose Richard goes by “Dick” which is his preferred name so if you use a person’s preferred name in one case and not another could be seen as discriminatory.

But bathrooms and locker rooms has been ruled on by the Trump court in our favor in the decision of Bostock v. Clayton. But still any court case is a crap shoot.

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Texas is not just trying to overturn Title VII but also marriage equality.

Texas abortion law architect now looking to overturn same-sex marriage ruling

He argued in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court that key LGBTQ+ rights decisions "have no basis in constitutional text or historical practice."

Up Worthy

By Jisha Joseph

September 23, 2021

Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general who is considered the architect of the state's radical 'heartbeat' law, has invited the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn key LGBTQ+ rights decisions. According to The Guardian, in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court ahead of its ruling on a Mississippi case limiting abortion to 15 weeks, Mitchell took aim at decisions that legalized same-sex relations and same-sex marriages in all 50 states. In the brief, Mitchell and co-counsel Adam Mortara called for the landmark Roe v Wade to be overturned while acknowledging that doing so could open the door for other "lawless" rights and protections to be reversed, including the right to have gay sex and the right to same-sex marriage.

Mitchell and Mortara argued that landmark LGBTQ victories — including Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 decision that banned states from criminalizing private, consensual gay sex, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states — "have no basis in constitutional text or historical practice" and that they "preserve the court-invented rights to homosexual behavior and same-sex marriage." They added that there isn't a "fundamental right to marry" in U.S. legal tradition and instead only a "right to marry an opposite-sex spouse" that must be protected.

Okay let stop right there, “have no basis in constitutional text or historical practice" so what did the courts base their decision on for those two cases?

The Fourteen Amendment is a simple amendment what it says is that you have to treat everyone equally in the law. Period.

So what the court said was in the Obergefell v. Hodges was if it was legal for a man and a woman to have sex then according to the 14^th Amendment it must also be legal for a same-sex couple to have sex because of the amendment.