Wow! The United States Supreme Court stunned LGBT advocates today by deciding that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Surprisingly, Justice Neil Gorsuch authored a majority 6-3 opinion in a combined case called Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the four liberals (Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer).
A key quote from the ruling:
An employer violates Title VII when it intentionally fires an individual employee based in part on sex. It makes no difference if other factors besides the plaintiff’s sex contributed to the decision or that the employer treated women as a group the same when compared to men as a group. A statutory violation occurs if an employer intentionally relies in part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to discharge the employee. Because discrimination on the basis of homosexuality or transgender status requires an employer to intentionally treat individual employees differently because of their sex, an employer who intentionally penalizes an employee for being homosexual or transgender also violates Title VII. There is no escaping the role intent plays: Just as sex is necessarily a but-for cause when an employer discriminates against homosexual or transgender employees, an employer who discriminates on these grounds inescapably intends to rely on sex in its decisionmaking.
This is a BFD!
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