This archive report was first published on 15 June 2020.
On June 15, 2020, the US Supreme Court delivered a major victory for LGBT workers and their allies, ruling that employers who fire workers for being gay or transgender are breaking the country's civil rights laws.
The court's decision, which came in a 6-3 ruling, said that federal law, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, should be understood to include sexual orientation.
Lawyers for the employers had argued that the authors of the 1964 Civil Rights Act had not intended it to apply to cases involving sexual orientation or transgender. However, Judge Neil Gorsuch, who was nominated to the court by President Donald Trump, disagreed, stating that acting against an employee on those grounds necessarily takes sex into account.
“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,” Judge Gorsuch wrote. “The limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.”
Impact of the Ruling ¶
With this ruling, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex as well as gender, race, color, national origin, and religion, now explicitly protects LGBT workers.
While some states in the US had already explicitly extended such protections to LGBT workers, many have not. This ruling brings federal law in line with the Obama administration's interpretation, which said that the law included gender identity and sexual orientation.
