Justices rule federal civil-rights law prohibits workplace discrimination against LGBT workers
The Supreme Court ruled that bedrock federal civil-rights law prohibits employers from discriminating against workers on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, a decision that for the first time extends federal workplace protections to LGBT employees nationwide.
The high court, in a landmark 6-3 decision, said the broad language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws workplace discrimination on the basis of sex, should be read to cover sexual orientation as well. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts in addition to the four more liberal members of the court, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” the opinion said.
The case extends a quarter-century of momentous advances for gay-rights advocates at the Supreme Court, even as the court has grown more conservative with the 2018 retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the court’s previous LGBT rights rulings, including the 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage.
For all its cultural and political controversy, Monday’s case was simple, Justice Gorsuch found. He focused on the text of the statute Congress passed in 1964, whose Title VII forbids workplace discrimination against an individual “because of…sex.”
Jess Bravin, Brent Kendall – The Wall Street Journal – June 15, 2020.
