Employers cannot fire workers because of their gender identity or sexual orientation, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday in a historic decision.
In a 6-3 vote, the justices found that “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII.”
The landmark case — one of the most consequential of the current term — looked into whether the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination on the basis of sex, also includes discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.
The decision combines three cases, all of which involved an employer who allegedly fired a longtime employee for being gay or transgender.
In the first, Gerald Bostock was fired from his job as an official in the Clayton County, Ga., judicial system for “conduct unbecoming of its employees” after he joined a gay softball league.
In another, the most prominent, Aimee Stephens, who died last month from complications of kidney failure, was fired from her job at R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes in Detroit, Mich., in 2013 after telling her employer she was transgender. The 59-year-old former funeral director had been employed for six years; two weeks after she came out to her boss, she was fired.
In the third, the late Donald Zarda said he was fired from a skydiving company on Long Island “because he did not conform to the sex stereotype that men should be attracted only to women,” a respondent brief filed by the ACLU stated.
Zarda, who at 44 died in 2014 in a BASE-jumping accident, sued his New York employer, Altitude Express, after he was fired.
In 2010, when he worked as a diving instructor, Zarda told a female customer he was gay to make her feel more comfortable when strapped to him. Her boyfriend didn’t like the comment, and later complained to Altitude Express.
“After the jump he was fired,” his sister, Melissa Zarda, wrote in an op-ed published in Time last year. His employer claimed he had engaged in “inappropriate behavior in the workplace.”
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the decision, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh dissented.
“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,” Gorsuch wrote. “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”
Gorsuch compared the decision to the subsequent results of the Civil Rights Act, including “the prohibition (of) discrimination on the basis on motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees.”
In his dissent, joined by Thomas, Alito argued that the Supreme Court’s decision is “legislation” and that Title VII, as written, only protects based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin, not sexual orientation or gender identity.
“Usurping the constitutional authority of the other branches, the Court has essentially taken H. R. 5’s provision on employment discrimination and issued it under the guise of statutory interpretation,” Alito wrote. “A more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall.”
Alito also quoted from the 1952 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, in which the American Psychiatric Association classified same-sex attraction as a “sexual deviation,” a particular type of “sociopathic personality disturbance.” That definition has been changed in the DSM since 1973.
In his own dissent, Kavanaugh quoted Alexander Hamilton, “federal judges exercise ‘neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment,'” in arguing the decision oversteps.
“In the face of the unsuccessful legislative efforts (so far) to prohibit sexual orientation discrimination, judges may not rewrite the law simply because of their own policy views,” he wrote.
“Judges may not update the law merely because they think that Congress does not have the votes or the fortitude. Judges may not predictively amend the law just because they believe that Congress is likely to do it soon anyway.”
The Trevor Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth, celebrated the “landmark decision (that) will save lives” in a statement.
“50 years ago, the very first Pride marches were launched in response to police brutality and violence,” CEO Amit Paley said. “It’s on us to continue that work and to foster the creation of safe, affirming environments for LGBTQ young people — especially queer and trans black young people — everywhere. LGBTQ young people deserve nothing less.”