The Supreme Court of the US has ruled that firing someone for being gay or trans violates the Civil RIghts Act. Opinion authored by … Neil Gorsuch.
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Definitive, nonweasly 6-3 USSC ruling for sanity and justice for the LGBTQ community written by Gorsuch! He is still an asshole, but for today he is a hero and I am overjoyed to picture the faces of the right wing asshats as they digest this one.
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Gorsuch is a conservative, but he’s got actual legal principles he holds onto. And sometimes, that means he’ll side with the liberal justices against the interests and desires of the Republican party and the regressive right.
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Oh, I am not questioning his credentials. He sits in the seat that was, by all justice, Merrick Garland’s. In my mind, that is sufficient to call him an asshole. However, for the moment, he is good in my book.
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Guaranteed that Trump has no idea whatsoever what this ruling means.
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None. But he is right, it is a “powerful” ruling that his base will have an absolute shit fit over.
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Anyone else hear a child blathering on because they don’t want to admit they didn’t read the assigned book?
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Just wait until he finds out the ruling is essentially the SC flipping him the bird.
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His USSC justice flipping him the bird. I cant wait for the “disloyalty” tweet storm. If only to get it out there in the open that he honestly feels he owns these people.
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I kinda think that may have had something to do with it too; a tiny modicum of a display of backbone, to signify that Gorsuch is not completely “45’s bitch.”
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He’ll be exploding on Twitter when he understands that this invalidates his revoking health care nondiscrimination- and possibly his trans military service ban.
The law itself says it applies to the military- even if case law disagrees this type of purely textualist decision seems completely on point. I expect it to get tested again shortly.
He’s loosing the issues he was ginning up for the campaign.
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A bit of history and how the sex stereotype approach that the Supreme Court upheld for gay & trans people was originally pioneered by trans plaintiffs.
Who should be remembered and honored today.
“ Interestingly, the original expansion of the landmark civil rights legislation to cover LGBTQ workers was pioneered by transgender plaintiffs. Those legal successes were later built upon in further litigation to also cover sexual orientation.”
“ and ever since the mid-aughts that prohibition has increasingly been viewed by federal courts as covering transgender workers from anti-trans bias. But, as I wrote for The Advocate in 2014, the first appeals court ruling to resolutely equate anti-trans bias with sex discrimination came in 2011 in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. In Glenn v. Brumby , Vandy Beth Glenn sued after being fired from her job as a legislative editor for the Georgia General Assembly based on her intent to transition.
That federal appeals court decision made the explicit connection that discriminating against transgender workers is a type of discrimination on the basis of not conforming with sex stereotypes. Within several months, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination laws, formalized its view in an unanimous ruling on Macy v. Holder that anti-trans bias in the workplace “is discrimination ‘based on. . .sex’” and therefore violates Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964. The codification by the EEOC, while only legally binding for federal agencies, gave federal courts another point of reference for interpreting the law.”
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I just saw an interesting piece about why the vote may have gone the way it did.
The (persuasive) theory is that Roberts only joined the majority so that he would get to decide who wrote the opinion. If he had voted against it, the decision would have been the same, but it would have fallen to Ginsburg to write the opinion.
As for Gorsuch’s vote, which did affect the decision, that article suggests it may have been a strategic retreat – it hands a victory to the enemy, but reinforces the broader right-wing agenda of establishing that the SC is a powerless slave of the exact wording of legislation. Plus, as his opinion makes explicit, it’s still an open question whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act can be used to discriminate against LGBT employees, regardless of this decision.
I think the second part might be a cynicism too far, but the point is, conservative Supremes may not be redeeming themselves as much as it seems here.
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