The 6-3 Supreme Court decision on LGBTQ Rights: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/15/politics/supreme-court-lgbtq-employment-case/index.html
Excerpt from the article:
The landmark ruling will extend protections to millions of workers nationwide and is a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination based on sex did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation.The 6-3 opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices.
“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 wrote.
“There is simply no escaping the role intent plays here: 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,” the opinion read.
“Today’s decision is one of the court’s most significant rulings ever with respect to the civil rights of gay and transgender individuals,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.“On its terms, the decision is only about discrimination in the workplace,” Vladeck added. “But it inevitably opens the door to a host of other challenges to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender status on the ground that it, too, is impermissibly based upon sex. In that respect, only the court’s 2015 ruling recognizing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage may be equally as significant.”Speaking at the White House, Trump called the decision “very powerful” and acknowledged it was surprising to some.“They’ve ruled and we live with the decision,” Trump said. “We live with the decision of the Supreme Court.”Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden called the ruling “a momentous step forward for our country.”“The Supreme Court has confirmed the simple but profoundly American idea that every human being should be treated with respect and dignity. That everyone should be able to live openly, proudly, as their true selves without fear,” Biden said.The LGBTQ community is made of up of approximately 1 million workers who identify as transgender and 7.1 million lesbian, gay and bisexual workers, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute.
Roberts said his vote with the liberals on Monday was based on the top court’s precedent in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, a case the court decided in 2016. In that case, the court struck down a nearly identical Texas law by a 5-3 vote. Roberts voted at the time to uphold the law.
But in his opinion on Monday, Roberts said that the legal doctrine known as stare decisis, or the principle of adhering to precedent, “requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases alike.”
“The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons,” Roberts wrote. “Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.”