The Supreme Court can, the President can’t.
Who exactly do you think SHOULD be the final word in interpreting the law if not the branch of government created for that specific purpose?
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No, anyone claiming it does not protect trans or gay rights is, legally speaking, straight up wrong. This is how the law works. When people have a dispute about what a law means, they take it to the courts, the courts decide what the law means, and that’s what the law means If you claim it means something else, you are wrong.
We can still debate the intent of the law. We can debate how we would have interpreted the law differently. We can point out that the meaning of the law can change in the future if a different court rules differently.
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Here’s a thought experiment:
Imagine two people, who present themselves alike in every way: personality, physical appearance, mannerisms, demeanor, dress, etc.
Person A applies to a program at State U. Person A is accepted into the program. Person B applies to the same program at State U, but is rejected. Why? because this program is a program for “men” and person A was assigned male at birth, while person B was assigned female at birth.
How would this not be “[exclusion] from participation” “based on sex”?
This was basically the rationale of the court, as I understand it.
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The court used similar reasoning to strike down other anti-gay policies.
The argument there: “If Jane is allowed to have a sexual/romantic relationship with John but Jim is not allowed to have a sexual/romantic relationship with John then Jim is clearly being treated differently based on his sex.”
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It’s a very literal, logical reading of the law, without any particular regard to the social norms of the time. I think some people call a conservative judicial philosophy.
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Here’s what the Supreme Court said:
The statute’s message for our cases is equally simple and momentous: An individual’s homosexuality or transgender status is not relevant to employment decisions. That’s be- cause it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex. Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague. Put differently, the employer intentionally singles out an employee to fire based in part on the employee’s sex, and the affected employee’s sex is a but-for cause of his discharge. Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision.
Do you disagree with that reasoning?
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It was a correct decision that protected women.
GTFO with this Scalia Jr. BS. He was wrong. We’re citizens with rights, not broodmares.
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Yeah, but see Roe v. Wade doesn’t protect women in exactly the way @Jeroen_Metselaa thinks the Constitution thinks women should be protected, so obviously it’s dangerous for the executive branch to enforce those protections because it makes the President one who “dictates laws” (AKA a dictator) to protect civil rights, or something like that. /Fe+H2SO4 (when regular sarcasm isn’t strong enough)
It’s some serious pretzel logic to go from “the US government isn’t obeying its constitution the way I think it says it ought to” to “the US government protecting (these) civil rights is dangerous.” And it tends to be the purview of those whose relative privilege protects them from having those same civil rights denied them.
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That’s really what is at the heart of modern “conservatism” today, of course.
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