7 ms·

Here's the decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf The dissenters b

by hvs 6y ago

Here's the decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf The dissenters basically believe that “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” doesn't include "sexual orientation" or "gender identity" so legislation would need to be passed to change that.

tejohnso 6y ago
>race, color, religion, sex, nationality Wouldn't it be more effective for the law to say that any discrimination that doesn't affect a person's ability to perform the job is not allowed? When you start itemizing specific traits it's a never-ending list. For example, the list quoted doesn't include eye color or hair color, or spoken language dialect, or ...
- SamuelAdams 6y ago
  Yes, but the case presented focused solely on the definition of "sex" in title VII so that's what the court ruled on. As programmers its easy for us to take it up to a more abstract level, but in the legal world I guess that's difficult to do.
  - pc86 6y ago
    It's not that it's more difficult to do, it's that you generally don't do it. SCOTUS in particular will not respond to, mention, or address anything even approaching a hypothetical scenario, which is sometimes frustrating when the specifics of a case aren't just ride for larger sweeping changes that society may want. You'll often hear of proponents of one reform or another saying that a given case is perfect for SCOTUS because it lines up very closely with their policy objectives.
    - rodw 6y ago
      I don't have an example off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure I've seen arguments presented to the SCOTUS that are absolutely based on hypotheticals, including hypotheticals introduced by the justices themselves. EDIT: Here's a very recent one: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/supreme-court-justice-s-coronavirus-vaccine-hypothetical-could-be-a-window-into-the-future/ar-BB13HDlP https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/supreme-court-justice-s-co...
      - pc86 6y ago
        Yes the justices ask questions around hypotheticals and can ask the attorneys to make arguments based on hypothetical situations the justices present, but they hear only specific cases, not hypothetical ones, and the decisions refer to the specifics of the attorneys' arguments and the case law only.
        rodw 6y ago
        Of course. There's no court case that is based entirely on a hypothetical. But it seems exceedingly common - especially on the scale of SCOTUS - to abstract a specific event or argument to the more general one. Take constitutional challenge to Obamacare for example. I assume they had to point to someone specific and say "this law violates that person's rights", but they absolutely "considered" and "responded to" the hypothetical in that case.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- eximius 6y ago
  More accurate? Maybe. More effective? No. You'd have endless lawsuits debating what traits do or do not affect a person's ability to perform.
- ryanmarsh 6y ago
  Yes, kinda. It's called "bona fide occupational qualification". The law states that you may discriminate so long as (race, sex, national origin, etc...) "is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise" Seems like we could refactor the law to just state this: You can only discriminate on bona fide qualifications. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/bona_fide_occupational_qualification_(bfoq) https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/bona_fide_occupational_quali...
- mulmen 6y ago
  The problem with that is how easy it is to construct an argument that something like race is an impediment to work because of the biases of coworkers or customers. Are blue eyed people being discriminated against? If the answer is no then your hypothetical is irrelevant and you are optimizing for the wrong case. These are protected classes to correct a real failing of our social system.
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    I'm sure some albinos could claim discrimination in customer-facing jobs due to skin tone and eye color. It just might not be obvious (e.g. the employer simply never called them back after the interview, rather than hiring them and explicitly firing them later for "scaring our customers").
- hpoe 6y ago
  Playing Devil's advocate, let's imagine I pour my life savings into opening up a fruit stand, it does well I move to a fruit store that is popular and everyone loves, at this point everything has been bought with my personal funds, it is basically my property, I run it as a sole proprietorship instead of an LLC, I hire people, but ultimately everything is bought paid for and owned by me. I also happen to hate people with purple hair and decide to ban them from my property and refuse to service to them. Now this is my store and property that I own, these are my goods that I sell. Why should the government be able to legally control what I choose to do with my property and my goods, if I want to pour them into a sewer, or set them on fire should I not be allowed to do that? So why should the government force me to sell them to people I do not want to? So the reasoning behind carving out every specific protection revolves around the idea that there should be a good reason for the government to control what I do with my private property, as it extends to reducing my liberty to do with my property what I want, and now becomes a matter of balancing various parts of the implicit social contract. Whether or not this is justified or which side is right is a different discussion but that is why each exception needs to be carved out as I understand it.
  - vertex-four 6y ago
    Because you live in a society that mostly functions because people mostly don't discriminate against each other, and the conditions which result in you being able to open a fruit stand for personal profit would be basically impossible without that. Luckily, this is mostly the case today, and for the cases where it's not eventually a law gets passed, so there's theoretically no reason for a broader law assuming that we don't... assuming that the goal is eventual consistency, so to speak.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      Some people would rather argue from their hypothetical spherical fruit stand in a vacuum than to argue from reality at hand.
  - pc86 6y ago
    You're absolutely allowed to discriminate based on hair color because it's not a protected class. As a society we have decided that discriminating on some things is abhorrent (race, et al), and other things is not (hair and eye color).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pc86 6y ago
  Protected characteristics are not an never-ending list, and that's the only thing you cannot discriminate based on. You are 100% free to post a job add saying that those with green eyes need not apply. You'll likely still be sued, and you might even lose, but it won't be due to Title VII.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  That's not really a justiciable standard. If I say only aggressive, pushy people can effectively sell cars at my dealership, and a timid person thinks I'm full of it, how's a court supposed to resolve that dispute?
- chadash 6y ago
  That's not the intention of these laws though. The basic presumption is "it's a free country, so people should be able to discriminate for whatever reason they want". However, when there's an overwhelming need for it, we will make carve-outs for specific situations. In particular things that people really can't change (race, nationality, sex) or that we deem as a society that they shouldn't have to change (religion). For anything that doesn't fall under these categories, it's fair game to discriminate. You don't like vegetarians or people who play tennis? You can discriminate. You're might be a f* moron for doing so, but we don't have laws against that.
  - st1ck 6y ago
    > race, color, religion, sex, or national origin Out of these you can't change only race and national origin. Sex can be changed, except on chromosome level. And religion is just as malleable as any ideology. I don't think it's any easier to convert a vegan to a carnivore than e.g. a Christian to Muslim.
    - f1refly 6y ago
      > Sex can be changed, except on chromosome level So it can't be changed after all
- will4274 6y ago
  Only if you believe discrimination laws are cost free. On the other hand, if you believe that such laws have cost at scale - frivolous lawsuits from fired employees erroneously claiming protection, and more constrained hiring and firing to avoid such lawsuits - then you'd only want anti-discrimination laws for the cases where discrimination has existed historically.
admiralspoo 6y ago
They are basically right. It is unimaginable anyone writing the 1964 Civil Rights Act had transgenders in mind.
- Miner49er 6y ago
  On the other hand, the entire idea of transgenderism is based on sex. Without sex, transgenderism doesn't exist. So by discriminating on the basis of if a person is transgender, you are by extension discriminating based on their sex.
  - treis 6y ago
    The counter to this would be that these bans aren't discriminatory on the basis of sex because the same rule applies to both sexes. It all depends on how you want to look at it. It can either be: (1) People can't have same sex relations (2) Women can have relations with men but men can't have relations with men. Practically they are the same, but (2) discriminates on the basis of sex while (1) does not.
    - evan_ 6y ago
      > Practically they are the same If they are the same then how can one way of stating it be discriminatory and the other not discriminatory? It's just word games. If the effect is discriminatory why does it matter how you wrote the law?
      - treis 6y ago
        They're both discriminatory. The question is what are you discriminating against?
    - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
      (1) references the subject's sex less directly, but it is clearly still referencing it, and thus is discriminating based on sex.
- 6y ago
VonGuard 6y ago
The dissenters on this one are horrific people. One of them is even a person of color. Imagine the hypocrisy.
swebs 6y ago
Huh, seems pretty obvious to me.
jorblumesea 6y ago
But isn't it literally the Supreme Court's job to interpret competing possibilities of extant laws? This seems like the weakest argument you could think of.
- pc86 6y ago
  SCOTUS does not consider or rule on hypotheticals, only the specifics of a given case. And generally, judges will rule only based on the individual attorneys' arguments, not other arguments they can think of but the attorneys did not make.
  - jorblumesea 6y ago
    I don't see what that has to do with anything. Saying that "congress should change the law because the law is vague" isn't a ruling. The Supreme Court has weighed in on far more vague and unclear laws before. It's basically just saying that they don't want to touch the issue.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - pc86 6y ago
      That's not the argument the dissenters are making. They're saying that the fact Congress has tried several times and failed to add specific orientation and transgender provisions is evidence they shouldn't be included in "sex" (otherwise Congress would see no reason to add those specific provisions). Just because we happen to disagree with the argument doesn't necessarily make it a bad legal argument.
rlewkov 6y ago
The dissenters said that the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not intend to cover sexual orientation or gender identity and that the proper remedy is for Congress to change the law and not for the courts to, in effect, become legislators.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- j0hnml 6y ago
  I could honestly see it both ways, but this argument seems relatively weak to me. The court here isn’t necessarily creating legislation but rather are making the judgment/interpretation that “sex” does include sexual orientation. From what I can tell making those kind of interpretations are at the core of the Court’s purpose.
  - Qub3d 6y ago
    That is exactly what the majority opinion stated in response to the historical meaning argument. It is not reasonable to expect every time a court finds a law should be applied in a way its never been applied before to then throw up their metaphorical hands and say "welp. Guess we have to let the legislative branch do something, our work here is done." Re-interpreting existing law is a HUGE component of our legal process. This goes all the way back to common law roots -- the court does not PREscribe law from above arbitrarily, rather it DEscribes the existing societal contract.
    - rtkwe 6y ago
      It's the same BS that got us out of control qualified immunity, just because a court hadn't already found that the precise way a cop/government official violated your rights was a violation of your rights they couldn't be charged for it. [0] More conservative justices love originalism because it lets them just throw back to the decisions of a more backwards time and say, 'well we have to respect their direct explicit intent' [1] it's a convenient way to not move forward. [0] Never mind that it also expects the existing case to be /exactly/ the same situation. [1] Often just what anyone appealing to originalism wants them to have intended.
SkyBelow 6y ago
The supporters (is that the right word) seem to agree. The issue isn't that the people were discriminated based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, but because of their sex. That is to say, if they were males presenting as females, then the discrimination is based on their sex of being male because had they been female presenting as female they would not have faced such discrimination. It seems like a six of one half dozen of another distinction, but I think it may become a factor when you start considering other sexual orientations. Primarily asexual individuals, but there are a number of other characteristics of humans that are currently classified as sexual attractions and not orientations but which some scientists think should be reclassified based on the biological/neurological basis as we better understand the difference between a preference and an orientation.
- jakkyboi 6y ago
  No you're completely right, the argument they make is quite correct: the discrimination is based on preconceived notions of who a certain sex is allowed to present as or be attracted to. The correct term would be the majority, or assenters maybe
- _asummers 6y ago
  > The supporters (is that the right word) FYI - the word is "the majority".
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  > there are a number of other characteristics of humans that are currently classified as sexual attractions and not orientations but which some scientists think should be reclassified based on the biological/neurological basis as we better understand the difference between a preference and an orientation. Could you give some further info please. You're talking distinctions that mean nothing to me. How could sexual attraction not be orientation or preference? It just doesn't make sense.
  - basch 6y ago
    A blanket policy ban on hiring people attracted to women, or people attracted to both sexes, or attracted to neither sex. The court did not add "sexual orientation" to the list of protected classes, they just said that firing a man for being attracted to a man, but not firing a woman for being attracted to a man is discrimination based on the sex of the employee.
abstractbarista 6y ago
To me that is so simple, and makes so much sense. It's time to legislate!
- enumjorge 6y ago
  I’m not sure why this thread is giving so little focus to the logic of the justices who voted in favor. Their argument makes sense too. The claim is that you can’t discriminate against LGBT employees without discriminating based on sex. If I tell my boss that, as a man, I have a husband and he fires me over it, he’s firing me because he thinks a man should not be in a relationship another man. He would not fire a woman for doing it, only a man. The court is saying that that is discrimination based on sex, which is covered by the language of the existing law. To me, that makes sense too. It’s not like the justices are making up reasons for one side or the other. Both sides had a point. That’s why it made it to the Supreme Court. And six justices interpreted it one way, and three the other and now we have the court’s decision.

by hvs 6y ago

tejohnso 6y ago

>race, color, religion, sex, nationality Wouldn't it be more effective for the law to say that any discrimination that doesn't affect a person's ability to perform the job is not allowed? When you start itemizing specific traits it's a never-ending list. For example, the list quoted doesn't include eye color or hair color, or spoken language dialect, or ...

SamuelAdams 6y ago
Yes, but the case presented focused solely on the definition of "sex" in title VII so that's what the court ruled on. As programmers its easy for us to take it up to a more abstract level, but in the legal world I guess that's difficult to do.
- pc86 6y ago
  It's not that it's more difficult to do, it's that you generally don't do it. SCOTUS in particular will not respond to, mention, or address anything even approaching a hypothetical scenario, which is sometimes frustrating when the specifics of a case aren't just ride for larger sweeping changes that society may want. You'll often hear of proponents of one reform or another saying that a given case is perfect for SCOTUS because it lines up very closely with their policy objectives.
  - rodw 6y ago
    I don't have an example off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure I've seen arguments presented to the SCOTUS that are absolutely based on hypotheticals, including hypotheticals introduced by the justices themselves. EDIT: Here's a very recent one: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/supreme-court-justice-s-coronavirus-vaccine-hypothetical-could-be-a-window-into-the-future/ar-BB13HDlP https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/supreme-court-justice-s-co...
    - pc86 6y ago
      Yes the justices ask questions around hypotheticals and can ask the attorneys to make arguments based on hypothetical situations the justices present, but they hear only specific cases, not hypothetical ones, and the decisions refer to the specifics of the attorneys' arguments and the case law only.
      - rodw 6y ago
        Of course. There's no court case that is based entirely on a hypothetical. But it seems exceedingly common - especially on the scale of SCOTUS - to abstract a specific event or argument to the more general one. Take constitutional challenge to Obamacare for example. I assume they had to point to someone specific and say "this law violates that person's rights", but they absolutely "considered" and "responded to" the hypothetical in that case.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
eximius 6y ago
More accurate? Maybe. More effective? No. You'd have endless lawsuits debating what traits do or do not affect a person's ability to perform.
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Yes, kinda. It's called "bona fide occupational qualification". The law states that you may discriminate so long as (race, sex, national origin, etc...) "is a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of that particular business or enterprise" Seems like we could refactor the law to just state this: You can only discriminate on bona fide qualifications. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/bona_fide_occupational_qualification_(bfoq) https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/bona_fide_occupational_quali...
mulmen 6y ago
The problem with that is how easy it is to construct an argument that something like race is an impediment to work because of the biases of coworkers or customers. Are blue eyed people being discriminated against? If the answer is no then your hypothetical is irrelevant and you are optimizing for the wrong case. These are protected classes to correct a real failing of our social system.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  I'm sure some albinos could claim discrimination in customer-facing jobs due to skin tone and eye color. It just might not be obvious (e.g. the employer simply never called them back after the interview, rather than hiring them and explicitly firing them later for "scaring our customers").
hpoe 6y ago
Playing Devil's advocate, let's imagine I pour my life savings into opening up a fruit stand, it does well I move to a fruit store that is popular and everyone loves, at this point everything has been bought with my personal funds, it is basically my property, I run it as a sole proprietorship instead of an LLC, I hire people, but ultimately everything is bought paid for and owned by me. I also happen to hate people with purple hair and decide to ban them from my property and refuse to service to them. Now this is my store and property that I own, these are my goods that I sell. Why should the government be able to legally control what I choose to do with my property and my goods, if I want to pour them into a sewer, or set them on fire should I not be allowed to do that? So why should the government force me to sell them to people I do not want to? So the reasoning behind carving out every specific protection revolves around the idea that there should be a good reason for the government to control what I do with my private property, as it extends to reducing my liberty to do with my property what I want, and now becomes a matter of balancing various parts of the implicit social contract. Whether or not this is justified or which side is right is a different discussion but that is why each exception needs to be carved out as I understand it.
- vertex-four 6y ago
  Because you live in a society that mostly functions because people mostly don't discriminate against each other, and the conditions which result in you being able to open a fruit stand for personal profit would be basically impossible without that. Luckily, this is mostly the case today, and for the cases where it's not eventually a law gets passed, so there's theoretically no reason for a broader law assuming that we don't... assuming that the goal is eventual consistency, so to speak.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Some people would rather argue from their hypothetical spherical fruit stand in a vacuum than to argue from reality at hand.
- pc86 6y ago
  You're absolutely allowed to discriminate based on hair color because it's not a protected class. As a society we have decided that discriminating on some things is abhorrent (race, et al), and other things is not (hair and eye color).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pc86 6y ago
Protected characteristics are not an never-ending list, and that's the only thing you cannot discriminate based on. You are 100% free to post a job add saying that those with green eyes need not apply. You'll likely still be sued, and you might even lose, but it won't be due to Title VII.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
That's not really a justiciable standard. If I say only aggressive, pushy people can effectively sell cars at my dealership, and a timid person thinks I'm full of it, how's a court supposed to resolve that dispute?
chadash 6y ago
That's not the intention of these laws though. The basic presumption is "it's a free country, so people should be able to discriminate for whatever reason they want". However, when there's an overwhelming need for it, we will make carve-outs for specific situations. In particular things that people really can't change (race, nationality, sex) or that we deem as a society that they shouldn't have to change (religion). For anything that doesn't fall under these categories, it's fair game to discriminate. You don't like vegetarians or people who play tennis? You can discriminate. You're might be a f* moron for doing so, but we don't have laws against that.
- st1ck 6y ago
  > race, color, religion, sex, or national origin Out of these you can't change only race and national origin. Sex can be changed, except on chromosome level. And religion is just as malleable as any ideology. I don't think it's any easier to convert a vegan to a carnivore than e.g. a Christian to Muslim.
  - f1refly 6y ago
    > Sex can be changed, except on chromosome level So it can't be changed after all
will4274 6y ago
Only if you believe discrimination laws are cost free. On the other hand, if you believe that such laws have cost at scale - frivolous lawsuits from fired employees erroneously claiming protection, and more constrained hiring and firing to avoid such lawsuits - then you'd only want anti-discrimination laws for the cases where discrimination has existed historically.

admiralspoo 6y ago

They are basically right. It is unimaginable anyone writing the 1964 Civil Rights Act had transgenders in mind.

Miner49er 6y ago
On the other hand, the entire idea of transgenderism is based on sex. Without sex, transgenderism doesn't exist. So by discriminating on the basis of if a person is transgender, you are by extension discriminating based on their sex.
- treis 6y ago
  The counter to this would be that these bans aren't discriminatory on the basis of sex because the same rule applies to both sexes. It all depends on how you want to look at it. It can either be: (1) People can't have same sex relations (2) Women can have relations with men but men can't have relations with men. Practically they are the same, but (2) discriminates on the basis of sex while (1) does not.
  - evan_ 6y ago
    > Practically they are the same If they are the same then how can one way of stating it be discriminatory and the other not discriminatory? It's just word games. If the effect is discriminatory why does it matter how you wrote the law?
    - treis 6y ago
      They're both discriminatory. The question is what are you discriminating against?
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    (1) references the subject's sex less directly, but it is clearly still referencing it, and thus is discriminating based on sex.
6y ago

VonGuard 6y ago

The dissenters on this one are horrific people. One of them is even a person of color. Imagine the hypocrisy.

swebs 6y ago

Huh, seems pretty obvious to me.

jorblumesea 6y ago

But isn't it literally the Supreme Court's job to interpret competing possibilities of extant laws? This seems like the weakest argument you could think of.

pc86 6y ago
SCOTUS does not consider or rule on hypotheticals, only the specifics of a given case. And generally, judges will rule only based on the individual attorneys' arguments, not other arguments they can think of but the attorneys did not make.
- jorblumesea 6y ago
  I don't see what that has to do with anything. Saying that "congress should change the law because the law is vague" isn't a ruling. The Supreme Court has weighed in on far more vague and unclear laws before. It's basically just saying that they don't want to touch the issue.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pc86 6y ago
    That's not the argument the dissenters are making. They're saying that the fact Congress has tried several times and failed to add specific orientation and transgender provisions is evidence they shouldn't be included in "sex" (otherwise Congress would see no reason to add those specific provisions). Just because we happen to disagree with the argument doesn't necessarily make it a bad legal argument.

rlewkov 6y ago

The dissenters said that the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not intend to cover sexual orientation or gender identity and that the proper remedy is for Congress to change the law and not for the courts to, in effect, become legislators.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
j0hnml 6y ago
I could honestly see it both ways, but this argument seems relatively weak to me. The court here isn’t necessarily creating legislation but rather are making the judgment/interpretation that “sex” does include sexual orientation. From what I can tell making those kind of interpretations are at the core of the Court’s purpose.
- Qub3d 6y ago
  That is exactly what the majority opinion stated in response to the historical meaning argument. It is not reasonable to expect every time a court finds a law should be applied in a way its never been applied before to then throw up their metaphorical hands and say "welp. Guess we have to let the legislative branch do something, our work here is done." Re-interpreting existing law is a HUGE component of our legal process. This goes all the way back to common law roots -- the court does not PREscribe law from above arbitrarily, rather it DEscribes the existing societal contract.
  - rtkwe 6y ago
    It's the same BS that got us out of control qualified immunity, just because a court hadn't already found that the precise way a cop/government official violated your rights was a violation of your rights they couldn't be charged for it. [0] More conservative justices love originalism because it lets them just throw back to the decisions of a more backwards time and say, 'well we have to respect their direct explicit intent' [1] it's a convenient way to not move forward. [0] Never mind that it also expects the existing case to be /exactly/ the same situation. [1] Often just what anyone appealing to originalism wants them to have intended.

SkyBelow 6y ago

The supporters (is that the right word) seem to agree. The issue isn't that the people were discriminated based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, but because of their sex. That is to say, if they were males presenting as females, then the discrimination is based on their sex of being male because had they been female presenting as female they would not have faced such discrimination. It seems like a six of one half dozen of another distinction, but I think it may become a factor when you start considering other sexual orientations. Primarily asexual individuals, but there are a number of other characteristics of humans that are currently classified as sexual attractions and not orientations but which some scientists think should be reclassified based on the biological/neurological basis as we better understand the difference between a preference and an orientation.

jakkyboi 6y ago
No you're completely right, the argument they make is quite correct: the discrimination is based on preconceived notions of who a certain sex is allowed to present as or be attracted to. The correct term would be the majority, or assenters maybe
_asummers 6y ago
> The supporters (is that the right word) FYI - the word is "the majority".
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
> there are a number of other characteristics of humans that are currently classified as sexual attractions and not orientations but which some scientists think should be reclassified based on the biological/neurological basis as we better understand the difference between a preference and an orientation. Could you give some further info please. You're talking distinctions that mean nothing to me. How could sexual attraction not be orientation or preference? It just doesn't make sense.
- basch 6y ago
  A blanket policy ban on hiring people attracted to women, or people attracted to both sexes, or attracted to neither sex. The court did not add "sexual orientation" to the list of protected classes, they just said that firing a man for being attracted to a man, but not firing a woman for being attracted to a man is discrimination based on the sex of the employee.

abstractbarista 6y ago

To me that is so simple, and makes so much sense. It's time to legislate!

enumjorge 6y ago
I’m not sure why this thread is giving so little focus to the logic of the justices who voted in favor. Their argument makes sense too. The claim is that you can’t discriminate against LGBT employees without discriminating based on sex. If I tell my boss that, as a man, I have a husband and he fires me over it, he’s firing me because he thinks a man should not be in a relationship another man. He would not fire a woman for doing it, only a man. The court is saying that that is discrimination based on sex, which is covered by the language of the existing law. To me, that makes sense too. It’s not like the justices are making up reasons for one side or the other. Both sides had a point. That’s why it made it to the Supreme Court. And six justices interpreted it one way, and three the other and now we have the court’s decision.