In a historical 6-3 landmark ruling, he United States Supreme Court has ruled the 1964 Civil Rights Act that bars sex discrimination in the workplace also protects LGBTQ employees from being fired for their sexual orientation. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch voted with the four liberal justices of the panel.
The opinion, available for public view on the Supreme Court’s website, said in part, “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.”
“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”
For the majority, Trump appointee Judge Neil Gorsuch wrote, “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.”
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Gorsuch said, “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,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative appointed by President Donald Trump, in the majority opinion.
Citing Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin and sex, Gorsuch said the word “sex” is inseparable from the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity.
“An employer who fires a woman, Hannah, because she is insufficiently feminine and also fires a man, Bob, for being insufficiently masculine may treat men and women as groups more or less equally. But in both cases the employer fires an individual in part because of sex,” Gorsuch wrote.
Job discrimination against the LGBT community was still technically legal in much of the U.S, with less than half of the states in the nation having laws prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. 11 million Americans identify themselves as LGBT.
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