by Jay Michaelson

“There is no question that Congress did not have gay or trans people in mind when the law was passed. So from an ideological point of view, the case presented a conflict between two conservative judicial philosophies: textualism (what the words on the page actually say) and originalism (what the writers of the law meant).”

In an historic win for the LGBTQ community, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that firing someone for being gay or trans violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Writing for the court, Justice Neil Gorsuch—a Trump nominee who had been promoted by the right-wing Federalist Society—wrote the opinion, which Chief Justice John Roberts and the four liberal justices joined. He wrote that “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.”

Three cases were consolidated into the single opinion. Bostock v. Clayton County was about the firing of Gerald Bostock after his employer (an agency of Clayton County, Georgia) found out he played in a gay softball league. In Altitude Express v. Zarda, Donald Zarda was fired from his job as a skydiving instructor when his employer learned he was gay. And in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC, Aimee Stephens, who had been living as a man, was fired after she told her employer she had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and would henceforth be living as a woman.

While acknowledging that Congress did not have LGBTQ+ people in mind when it passed the law in 1964, Gorsuch—true to form—focused on the written text of the law, which contains a broad prohibition on discriminating “because of sex.” That means that any time sex (as defined, in biological terms, in 1964) is part of the reason for a hiring or firing decision, that decision is illegal.

So, for example, “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.”

That is the precise argument made by a host of LGBTQ+ organizations, and strongly opposed by the Trump administration. Read more via Daily Beast