The U.S. Supreme Court caught up with public sentiment Monday when it agreed to protect the rights of gay and transgender people in the workplace.
By a 6-3 vote, the justices ruled employers cannot discriminate against employees because of their sexual orientation. The decision included the buy-in of conservative-leaning Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch. Gorsuch, appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017, wrote the majority opinion.
The prevailing justices ruled that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on one’s race, religion, national origin and sex, also covers the rights of those who are gay and transgender.
Opponents contend that in 1964 such people did not play a relevant role in society, and as such, the law was not intended for them.
“If every single living American had been surveyed in 1964, it would have been hard to find any who thought that discrimination because of sex meant discrimination because of sexual orientation — not to mention gender identity, a concept that was essentially unknown at the time,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito, who was joined by justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh in his dissent.
Instead, they said, the law applied only to the equal treatment between men and women, and not how they identified themselves, which, they argued, would require an entirely new law.
While Gorsuch acknowledged that in 1964, the LGBTQ community was still very much in the closet, it doesn’t mean the intent of the law does not include them today.
“The limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands, today” he said.
Proponents said you can’t isolate a person’s sexual orientation from his or her sex.
“It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” Gorsuch wrote.
It is wrong, Gorsuch continued, to discriminate against a male employee for being attracted to another male, while tolerating those same traits in a female.
Be they male or female, gay or transgender, it doesn’t matter — the law is there to serve them.
Americans overwhelmingly agree with the justices’ majority opinion.
A recent survey by researchers at Harvard, Stanford and the University of Texas showed that 83% of Americans agree it should be illegal for employees to be fired because of their sexual orientation.
Lawyers with the Trump administration sided with employers who defended their rights to fire employees based on their sexual orientation.
