America’s top court has ruled that employers who fire workers for being gay or transgender (LGBT) are breaking the country’s civil rights laws.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court said federal law, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, should be understood to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
The ruling is a major win for LGBT workers and their allies.
And it comes even though the court has grown more conservative.
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 and gender identity. The Trump administration sided with that argument.
But Judge Neil Gorsuch, who was nominated to the court by President Donald Trump, said 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,” he wrote. “The limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands.”
What does this mean?
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex as well as gender, race, colour, national origin and religion.
Under the Obama administration, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces the anti-discrimination law, said it included gender identity and sexual orientation. But the Trump administration has moved to roll back some protections in health care and other areas.
While some states in the US had already explicitly extended such protections to LGBT workers, many have not.
What did the court say?
In his opinion, Mr Gorsuch said such matters were not before the court.
“The only question before us is whether an employer who fires someone for being homosexual or transgender has discharged or otherwise discriminated against that individual ‘because of such individual’s sex’,” he wrote.
The answer, he said, was “clear” – even if such a scenario had not been anticipated when the law was written.
“It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” he wrote.
Three conservative justices opposed the ruling: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh.
“There is only one word for what the court has done today: legislation,” Mr Alito wrote in his dissent.
Some key moments in US LGBT history
- January 1958 – The US Supreme Court rules for the first time in favour of LGBT rights, saying an LGBT magazine, deemed obscene by the FBI and postal service, had first amendment rights
- July 1961 – Illinois becomes the first state to decriminalise homosexuality
- June 1969 – Protests begin after police raid the Stonewall Inn in New York City, now seen as the start of the LGBT civil rights movement
- September 1996 – President Clinton defines marriage as a union between “one man and one woman”
- June 2003 – The US Supreme Court determines sodomy laws to be unconstitutional
- October 2009 – Democratic President Barack Obama signs the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Law, expanding hate crime laws to include sexual orientation
- June 2015 – In a landmark decision, the US Supreme Court rules 5-4 that same-sex marriage is legal across the country
- June 2016 – The Pentagon lifts its ban on having transgender Americans serve in the military
- March 2018 – Republican President Donald Trump issues a policy banning transgender Americans from serving in the military
