The Trump Administration Asked The Supreme Court To Legalize Firing Workers Simply For Being Gay [View all]
Source: BuzzFeed News
The Trump Administration Asked The Supreme Court To Legalize Firing Workers Simply For Being Gay
Friday's brief comes after the administration argued that federal law allows firing workers simply for being transgender.
Dominic Holden
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on August 23, 2019, at 3:29 p.m. ET
The Trump administration took its hardest line yet to legalize anti-gay discrimination on Friday when it asked the Supreme Court to declare that federal law allows private companies to fire workers based only on their sexual orientation.
An amicus brief (1) filed by the Justice Department weighed in on two cases involving gay workers and what is meant by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination "because of sex." The administration argued courts nationwide should stop reading the civil rights law to protect gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers from bias because it was not originally intended to do so.
That view conflicts with some lower court rulings that found targeting someone for their sexual orientation is an illegal form of both sex discrimination and sex stereotyping under Title VII. Those courts have found, to illustrate the point, that a gay man wouldn't be targeted if he were instead a woman dating a man; thus he faced discrimination because of his sex.
But the administration said in its brief Friday that Title VII's ban on sex discrimination only prohibits unequal treatment between "biological sexes," as it argued last week in a related brief against transgender rights, in which the Justice Department said companies should be able to fire people because they are transgender as well.
Congress did not explicitly say that the meaning of sex in Title VII encompasses LGBTQ people, so, the administration argues, the law cannot apply to sexual orientation. Federal lawyers are asking the Supreme Court, for the first time, to explicitly limit the Civil Right Act's protections to exclude LGBTQ people.
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(1) https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/17/17-1618/113417/20190823143040818_17-1618bsacUnitedStates.pdf
Read more: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/dominicholden/trump-scotus-gay-workers
Hat tip, Joe.My.God:
Trump To SCOTUS: Legalize Firing People For Being Gay
August 23, 2019
https://www.joemygod.com/2019/08/trump-to-scotus-legalize-firing-people-for-being-gay/
= new reply since forum marked as read
