The vote turned out to overcome party affiliation when two of the court’s Republican appointees, Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts, joined with their Democratic appointees in giving a huge victory to LGBT advocates, according to Politico.
Three justices, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas dissented, reports Market Watch.
“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,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court, reports the Associated Press. “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”
An estimated 11.3 million LGBT people live in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA law school. The court’s ruling will affect almost 8.1 million LGBT workers from discrimination because most states don’t protect them from workplace discrimination.
Twenty-eight U.S. states have adopted no laws that prohibit workplace discrimination targeting LGBT employees. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has treated LGBT-based job discrimination cases as sex discrimination since 2013. The Supreme Court’s ruling today has changed how these cases are viewed.
“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,” Gorsuch wrote.
“But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands,” he continued. “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.”
This ruling will probably not be the last word the high court will have on LGBT rights and discrimination cases. There are lawsuits pending involving transgender athletes’ participation in school sporting events, and courts also are dealing with cases about sex-segregated bathrooms and locker rooms,
More recently, in a reversal of Obama-era health care protections for the LGBT community, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced it will be “returning to the government’s interpretation of sex discrimination according to the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology.”
A number of organizations, including the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign plan on suing the Trump administration over the protection rollbacks. So more than likely, this issue over healthcare discrimination will also make it to the Supreme Court.
