“We agree that homosexuality and transgender status are distinct concepts from sex”.
Yet they reinterpret the 1964 law to read in those concepts to a law which obviously didn’t contemplate them and expands the law to include them.
Whether you think that homosexuality and transgenderism should be protected (as a general matter, with exceptions, I think they should be protected), the legal argument is completely made up whole cloth and is legislation from the bench, enforcing laws which were not contemplated by the people who made the laws.
For those interested in the legal “reasoning” used to get to this decision.
TL:DR : Even though everyone agrees that the term “sex” doesn’t mean “homosexual” or “transgendered” and that this law was never intended to cover those categories, the majority thinks that they are connected enough to “sex” that Title VII has to apply to them as well. The dissent points out that a textual and originalist reading of the statute would not come to that conclusion, and that no one uses the word “sex” in the same way that the majority uses it in this opinion.
“Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result,” wrote Justice Gorsuch. “But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.”
(Gorsuch) is also a conservative justice with a strong belief that the Supreme Court should not be driving social change. This case brought those two core principles to a head, and strict textualism won.
In a detailed, 32-page scrutiny of the “because of … sex” phrase in Title VII, he makes the pivotal holding that while the law doesn’t explicitly reference LGBTQ employees, and while Congress in 1964 may not have intended it to cover them, it protects those employees nonetheless.
“When an employer fires an employee for being homosexual or transgender, it necessarily and intentionally discriminates against that individual in part because of sex,” he wrote.
Title VII “is a major piece of federal civil rights legislation. It is written in starkly broad terms. It has repeatedly produced unexpected applications,” he added. “The same judicial humility that requires us to refrain from adding to statutes requires us to refrain from diminishing them.”
I see this as SCOTUS pointing out once again that the Legislative Branch has been phoning it in for a little too long.
Also glad that all people can feel their job security is not threatened by who they are.
I generally agree with the outcome, but it shouldn’t happen through the courts. Process matters, as does the rule of law.
There have been many failed attempts to get sexual orientation into Title VII, but they failed on a legislative basis. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. The Constitution was designed to set up a system which protects individual liberty and limits the power of the federal government. Changes that affect all the States and people in them need to be based on more than a 50% plus 1 to ensure that individual and state liberties are not trampled by a simple majority.
There is also a strong argument to be made (and at least one of the dissents makes this argument) that by having 6 judges effectively end the widespread debate on these topics which have been ongoing, you slow down acceptance of the general principles involved.
Of course it does. Why try and change the law to cover something if you believed it was already supposed to cover it? It is a tacit admission that the law didn’t cover homosexuality. I guess it doesn’t matter much when the judges decide they don’t care what the intent of the law was, but in an honest analysis of the strength of a case, it matters.
Or, adults don’t need to to be bound by a single ideology. If this means that Rational Compassion has awoken again, fine by me. We’re gonna need a heap of it.
My Con Law professor said that when examining a constitutional case “if you always get to the result you want, you don’t have a coherent Constitutional philosophy”. He was right.
I don’t want SCOTUS to have “rational compassion”, whatever that means. I want them to determine the constitutionality and meaning of laws with a logical, consistent judicial philosophy based on the text of the statutes and TheConstitution and the intent of those who wrote them.
When gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. support was about 50-40. Now it’s 63-31. Would it have been higher after a long series of legislative battles? Maybe, but I doubt it.
