Trump on Transgender SCOTUS Ruling: We Have to Live With It
By News Day. The Trump administration was on the losing side as the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a momentous victory for LGBT rights on Monday. The court ruled that a landmark 1964 civil rights law also protects gay and transgender employees against workplace discrimination.
The 6-3 decision centered on three cases — including one lawsuit filed by a Long Island skydiver who didn’t live to see the milestone ruling, reports Newsday’s Yancey Roy. The two justices picked by Trump were split, with Neil Gorsuch writing the majority opinion, joined by four liberal colleagues and Chief Justice John Roberts. Brett Kavanaugh dissented, saying it should be up to Congress to decide on expanding protections.
Trump’s administration backed the employers being sued. It argued that Congress hadn’t intended to stop discrimination based on sexual orientation when it enacted the civil rights law.
Trump’s position was in sync with religious conservatives in his base, but the president’s reaction after the decision was on the mild side. “They’ve ruled and we live with their decision,” he told reporters. “That’s what it’s all about … Very powerful — very powerful decision, actually.” (Read more from “Trump on Transgender SCOTUS Ruling: We Have to Live With It” HERE)
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Gorsuch Applied a Perverse and Upside Down Type of Hermenutics to Statutory Text: A Demonic Twist to Textualism and Originalism
By Senator Josh Hawley. This decision, and the majority who wrote it, represents the end of something. It represents the end of the conservative legal movement, or the conservative legal project, as we know it. After Bostock, that effort, as it has existed up to now, is over. I say this because if textualism and originalism give you this decision, if you can invoke textualism and originalism in order to reach such a decision—an outcome that fundamentally changes the scope and meaning and application of statutory law—then textualism and originalism and all of those phrases don’t mean much at all.
And if those are the things that we’ve been fighting for—it’s what I thought we had been fighting for, those of us who call ourselves legal conservatives—if we’ve been fighting for originalism and textualism, and this is the result of that, then I have to say it turns out we haven’t been fighting for very much.
Or maybe we’ve been fighting for quite a lot, but it’s been exactly the opposite of what we thought we were fighting for.
Now, this is a very significant decision and it marks a turning point for every conservative. And it marks a turning point for the legal conservative movement.
The legal conservative project has always depended on one group of people in particular in order to carry the weight of the votes to actually support this out in public, to get out there and make it possible electorally. And those are religious conservatives. I am one myself. Evangelicals, conservative Catholics, conservative Jews: let’s be honest, they’re the ones who have been the core of the legal conservative effort.
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Workers Can’t Be Fired for Being Gay or Transgender, Supreme Court Rules
By The Hill. The Supreme Court on Monday ruled 6-3 in a landmark decision that gay and transgender employees are protected by civil rights laws against employer discrimination.
A set of cases that came before the court had asked the justices to decide whether Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids discrimination on the basis of “sex,” applies to gay and transgender people.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the opinion for the six-member majority, said that it does.
Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender,” Gorsuch wrote. “The answer is clear. 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. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”
Gorsuch was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision. (Read more from “Workers Can’t Be Fired for Being Gay or Transgender, Supreme Court Rules” HERE)
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