Supreme Court Upholds anti-discrimination law for Gay and Trans people

RichardGarfinkle

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Good legal news. The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision upheld the rights of Gay and Trans people against being fired for their orientation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/us/gay-transgender-workers-supreme-court.html

But the manner in which they did so has some risks. First, the opinion written by Gorsuch says that you can't fire someone for being Gay or Trans without also firing them on sex discrimination grounds. Ergo Title VII which outlaws firing on sex grounds makes it impossible to fire someone legally on grounds of being Gay or Trans.

The worrying part of this is that Title VII is law and therefore can be changed by Congress. Had they decided based on the 14th Amendment, the rights would be safer.

Nevertheless, this was unexpected good news, since the court is 5-4 conservative.
 

dickson

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There are reasons for concerns about the scope of this decision, e. g. the risk of "religious freedom" carve-outs, but it is still rare good news in a dark time.
 

Drascus

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I'm really excited for this! Sure, it's not a perfect decision but it's way better than what I expected from this Supreme Court. Progress forward that will hopefully lead to more.

Now if we could just get the government to agree that LGBTQA people shouldn't be left to die by medical professionals.
 
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Ariel.Williams

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Yeah, I was glad to see this news but was hoping something would be done about the healthcare discrimination, especially given we’re in the middle of a pandemic. Hopefully this means the Supreme Court will be more likely to grant more protections if/when given the chance.
 

Drascus

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Yeah, I was glad to see this news but was hoping something would be done about the healthcare discrimination, especially given we’re in the middle of a pandemic. Hopefully this means the Supreme Court will be more likely to grant more protections if/when given the chance.

One encouraging take on the ruling that I read says that since the ruling says that Sex Discrimination = LGBT Discrimination, a court challenge to the health care issue will likely succeed now. Lower courts will point at the SCOTUS decision and say, "The Supremes have already said that what you're doing falls under sex discrimination".

At least we can hope!