The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether the federal law that bans sex discrimination in the workplace also protects gay and transgender employees from being fired or not hired.
The three cases to be heard in the fall figure to be the most important civil rights dispute since the court’s ruling four years agoMore than 20 states, including California, expressly prohibit discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender persons in the workplace. But Congress has not adopted a similar provision in federal law.
In doing so, those judges agreed that Congress in 1964 did not intend to protect gay, lesbian or transgender persons, but they said the wording of the law applies broadly to discrimination based on sex. “Male-on-male sexual harassment in the workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress was concerned with,” Scalia wrote in. “But statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.”
“We now hold that Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act] prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation as discrimination ‘because of ... sex,’” the 2nd Circuit said. “Legal doctrine evolves,” the judges said, noting that in 2015, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces the federal law, “held for the first time that sexual orientation is inherently a sex‐based consideration.
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