The US Supreme Court said in a landmark decision Monday that existing civil-rights legislation protects gay, lesbian and transgender people from discrimination in employment.
The court’s 6-3 ruling, written by Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, said a provision in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 known as Title VII that bars job discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin also covers LGBTQ workers.
“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. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,” Gorsuch wrote in the opinion.
The court’s four liberal justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Bryer — agreed.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanugh dissented.
“The Court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous. Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination because of ‘sex’ is different from discrimination because of ‘sexual orientation’ or ‘gender identity,’” Alito wrote.
The cases at the center of the ruling involved two gay men and a transgender woman who sued for employment discrimination.
In one, Donald Zarda, a skydiving instructor in Central Islip on Long Island, said he was fired in 2010 after he told a woman preparing for a parachute jump that he was gay, in an effort to put her at ease.
The woman told her boyfriend, who complained to the skydiving school, which fired Zarda.
The federal appeals court in New York ruled in favor of Zarda, who died in 2014.
But the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals said Title VII didn’t cover sexual orientation because “legal doctrine evolves.”
The other cases were brought in Georgia and Michigan.
With Post Wires