Michael Pack, the head of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) who was chosen by Donald Trump, has appointed a new federal agency director with ties to an anti-LGBT+ organisation.
The USAGM is an independent agency which oversees state-run media outlets, for example Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and it says its mission is “to inform, engage and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy” in accordance with “broad foreign policy objectives of the United States”.
According to CNBC, Pack terminated longtime board members within weeks of being appointed and replaced them with Trump loyalists.
Now, he is reportedly moving to appoint two new members to the federal media agency board of directors who are vehemently anti-LGBT+.
Sources “familiar with the matter” told the publication about the new appointments, but chose to remain anonymous as they have not yet been formally announced.
According to the sources, Jonathan Alexandre is set to become a corporate board member for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
However, Alexandre is currently the senior counsel for governmental affairs at Liberty Counsel, which is listed as an extremist group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC).
The SPLC describes it as “a legal organisation advocating for anti-LGBT discrimination under the guise of religious liberty”.
A second board member reportedly set to be appointed by Pack has a history of anti-trans activism.
Bethany Kozma is reportedly also going to join the board of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
In 2016, she started a campaign to overturn President Barack Obama’s guidance allowing trans students to use the bathroom of their choice.
In an op-ed for conservative news site The Daily Signal, started by right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, Kozma engaged in the kind of scaremongering used by anti-trans activists all over the US.
Kozma wrote: “Our message was that this radical agenda of subjective ‘gender fluidity’ and unrestricted shower and bathroom access actually endangers all.”
She added: “Predators could abuse these new policies to hurt children.”
The Trump administration rescinded Obama’s guidance in 2017.
Hope for Wholeness, a prominent ex-gay ministry that boasts one of the most expansive networks of conversion therapy offerings in the United States, is disbanding.
The Spartanburg, South Carolina-based organization, founded in 1999 as Truth Ministries, told members in an email Monday and obtained by NBC News that Hope for Wholeness would be closing its operations, citing the group’s difficulties in retaining a director to lead their efforts.
“It has been a tumultuous several years for us. We lost the founding director, searched for two years for his replacement, hired a new director and then lost that director as well,” the memo, which was signed by the group’s board, states. “After much prayer and discussion, we have made the difficult decision to dissolve the organization. This was not an easy decision. But we do believe it is the right decision.”
Hope for Wholeness’ credo, prominently displayed across the top of its website, is “freedom from homosexuality through Jesus Christ.”
Conversion therapy — made up of various universally discredited and harmful methods of counseling and ministry meant to eradicate or suppress LGBTQ identities — has been banned for minors in 20 states and Washington, D.C. California was the first state to prohibit the practice in 2012, but over half of the bans have only been in effect since 2018. In June 2019, data from UCLA’s Williams Institute estimated that at least 698,000 adults in the U.S. have been subjected to some form of conversion therapy.
The Hope for Wholeness memo did not lay out a timeline for the dissolution process, though it implied the action was effective immediately. A representative for Hope for Wholeness declined to comment on Thursday.
The organization pledged in its letter to redirect any remaining funds, though that amount is unknown, to another conversion therapy group called Abba’s Delight in Louisville, Kentucky — which brands itself as a ministry “dealing with unwanted same gender attractions” — in hopes of laying the groundwork for similar programs in the future.
While the collapse of Hope for Wholeness is a major victory for advocacy groups pushing for legislative efforts to ban conversion therapy on minors, their sights are set on what other ex-gay groups stand to gain from Hope for Wholeness’ absence.
“This is enormous for a lot of reasons,” said Mathew Shurka, co-founder of the Born Perfect project, which aims to end conversion therapy in every state. “Hope for Wholeness is a well-known conversion therapy organization that has cheated lots of people.”
Hope for Wholeness was originally an offshoot of Exodus International, which, for decades, was the center of the ex-gay movement and had more than 120 ministries in the United States and Canada. Exodus was dissolved in 2013 after the organization’s leader announced at a conference he would resign and apologized to those who spent “years working through the shame and guilt when your attractions didn’t change.”
Hope for Wholeness would eventually grow to become one of the nation’s most expansive ex-gay groups — Exodus’ heir apparent — with members and affiliates in at least 15 states. Like Exodus, Hope for Wholeness’ main event every year was a national conference that drew hundreds.
How much money the nonprofit has raised and how many people ascribed to its teachings in recent years isn’t entirely clear. Legally, the group isn’t required to disclose how many individuals it “treats” annually — but a tax filing from 2007 shows that the ministry provided more than 500 sessions and 60 group meetings for “religious counseling and training.”
Shurka pointed to what he called the “domino effect” triggered by the closure of Exodus International in 2013. Hope for Wholeness was born only after select members of Exodus wanted to continue the group’s mission after it closed.
“Conversion therapy is an industry, and whether those individuals are licensed professionals or they’re nonprofits, there’s still money to be made,” said Shurka, 32, a survivor of conversion therapy. “All on the false promise that they can make gay people straight, [which] is fraudulent … So the fact that Hope for Wholeness has reserve funds that’s going to go somewhere else speaks to that fraud.”
“It’s a vicious cycle,” he added.
Hope for Wholeness’ founder and former director, McKrae Game, 51, echoed Shurka. Game made waves late last year when he denounced the group he founded and came out as gay himself. He had resigned his post in 2017.
“Everything takes money,” Game said. “And so, you know, not too many people want to throw money at the Titanic as it’s taking water — and that’s essentially what ex-gay ministry is.”
A coalition of advocacy groups sued the Trump administration on Monday over its rollback of LGBTQ patient protections, arguing that last week’s Supreme Court decision extending workplace legal protections to gay and transgender employees invalidates the new rules.
Big picture: The suit marks the first challenge stemming from the 6-3 high court decision that anti-discrimination protections based on sex also apply to a person’s gender identity and sexual orientation.
The decision authored by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch is expected to have ramifications for LGBTQ legal challenges ranging from health care to education.
Senator James Lankford, R-Okla., on Thursday blocked Senate consideration of the Equality Act, an LGBTQ civil rights bill, by citing “Harry Potter” author J. K. Rowling’s recent blog post, which has been criticized as a “transphobic manifesto.”
“To say in the words of J.K. Rowling this past week where she wrote, ‘All I’m asking, all I want is for similar empathy, similar understanding to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats or abuse,’” Lankford said on the Senate floor, as first reported by The Washington Blade. “Let’s work together to get equality. This bill does not do it in this form.”
The Equality Act would amend civil rights bills pertaining to employment, housing, public accommodations, jury service, education, federal programs and credit by adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to their lists of protected classes.
In a landmark Supreme Court decision on Monday, the justices ruled that the ban on workplace sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is inclusive of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
But a bipartisan group of senators on Wednesday called upon Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, to bring the Equality Act up for a vote, saying existing law provides “insufficient recourse” for LGBTQ people facing discrimination.
“In a landmark victory for justice and equality, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that employers cannot unfairly fire or otherwise discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people in the workplace,” the senators wrote. “However, current gaps in nondiscrimination laws leave many people subject to discrimination, which is why we urge you to schedule a vote to pass the Equality Act.”
“The Equality Act would provide unequivocal nondiscrimination protections for people on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity in a number of areas, including public spaces and services, housing, education, credit, jury service and federally funded programs, as well as explicitly codifying the Supreme Court’s holding regarding employment,” the senators continued. “By explicitly including sexual orientation and gender identity in civil rights laws, we can ensure that every person can live their life free from harassment and discrimination.”
Gillian Branstetter, a transgender advocate and spokeswoman for the National Women’s Law Center, said, “Nearly every attack on the rights of women in American history has been poorly disguised as an attempt to act in women’s best interest — whether it was the anti-suffragists, the antifeminists, or anti-abortion activists.”
“Those opposing transgender equality are no different and — as the Supreme Court affirmed earlier this week — you cannot limit the rights of transgender women without limiting the rights of all women.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling protecting LGBTQ rights in the workplace sets the stage for another major legal fight over the scope of religious-rights exemptions to certain federal laws that could dilute the landmark decision’s impact.
The justices ruled 6-3 on Monday that federal employment law safeguards gay and transgender employees from discrimination but failed to resolve some related legal questions. One of them is whether the court, which has 5-4 conservative majority, will expand the ability of individuals, businesses and organizations to cite religious beliefs when contesting government actions such as enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.
In their next term, which starts in October, the justices will decide whether Philadelphia violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and religion in how it dealt with an organization that is part of the city’s Roman Catholic archdiocese. City officials barred Catholic Social Services from participating in Philadelphia’s foster-care program because the organization barred same-sex couples from serving as foster parents, a violation of its anti-discrimination policies.
A ruling in favor of Catholic Social Services could make it easier for people to cite religious beliefs when seeking exemptions from widely applicable laws, potentially even in employment cases.
“There are absolutely ways it could come out that would mean there’s a constitutional right to discriminate,” said American Civil Liberties Union lawyer James Esseks as the justices consider various options for deciding the dispute.
Catholic Social Services has asked the court to overturn a 1990 Supreme Court ruling in the case Employment Division v. Smith that limited such exemptions. Overturning that ruling “would open up a whole panoply of religious defenses,” said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom.
Religious Freedom Restoration Act
Even if the court does not do so, employers can still mount religious-based defenses under a 1993 federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
R.G. and G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc of Detroit, one of the employers named in the discrimination cases the Supreme Court decided on Monday, had cited that law in its defense after a transgender former employee, Aimee Stephens, sued the company.
The Supreme Court did not decide the Religious Freedom Restoration Act issues. Justice Neil Gorsuch, the ruling’s author, wrote that “how these doctrines protecting religious liberty interact with Title VII (the section of the civil rights law at issue) are questions for future cases.”
Employers have a “pretty good start” in making a religious rights claim following a 2014 Supreme Court ruling that allowed that law to be invoked by companies, University of Miami School of Law constitutional law professor Caroline Mala Corbin said.
Beyond the religious rights issue, there is the question of whether other federal laws barring sex-based discrimination, including those involving bias in housing and education, should be interpreted as covering sexual orientation and gender identity. If so, that could affect the ongoing dispute over whether transgender students can be barred from using the bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity, as a Virginia school district did in a case pending in the lower courts.
The Supreme Court in recent years has sent mixed messages on the intersection between gay and religious rights. It backed gay rights in a series of rulings culminating in the 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. But it also bolstered religious rights, including in the 2014 ruling allowing owners of businesses to raise religious objections against the government.
The justices in 2018 handed a victory on narrow grounds to a Colorado baker who refused based on his Christian beliefs to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, but stopped short of setting a major precedent letting people claim religious exemptions from anti-discrimination laws.
Central to those cases was conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018. President Donald Trump appointed Brett Kavanaugh to replace him. Kennedy wrote the gay marriage ruling, joining with the court’s liberals, but joined with his fellow conservatives in the religious-rights and baker decisions.
Kavanaugh, like Gorsuch, has shown sympathy toward religious liberty claims. Kavanaugh dissented in Monday’s ruling.
Bursch said there is a “strong possibility” that the 6-3 vote breakdown in Monday’s ruling would not be replicated when the court decides the foster care case, with a ruling due by the end of June 2021.
Even with this week’s Supreme Court ruling, the workplace will be far from equal for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.
While the nation’s highest court says you can’t be fired for your sexual orientation or gender identity under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there are still gaps. For instance, the federal law doesn’t protect those who work at businesses with fewer than 15 workers. It doesn’t address bathrooms for transgender people. And it’s still an open question whether employers can fire an LGBTQ person for religious reasons.
Then there are gaps in employee benefits. Some employers may not pay for medical care for transgender people, or could leave out LGBTQ families.
That’s not to diminish the significance of the Supreme Court ruling, which some advocates say was an even bigger deal for LGBTQ Americans than marriage equality.
The “decision was a watershed,” said Kasey Suffredini, CEO of Freedom for All Americans, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “But at the same time it’s so basic and entry level. Now we actually get into the details into how that discrimination plays out in everyday lives.”
Health care benefits
Transgender workers and people in same-sex relationships often face disparities in access to health care. Employers play a role because they work with insurance companies to decide which treatments should be covered under their employees’ health insurance plans.
For example, an insurance plan that a company crafts for employees may cover hormone treatments for a woman undergoing menopause, but it might not cover hormone treatments that a doctor prescribes for a transgender patient. And same-sex couples sometimes are shut out of benefits such as access to fertility treatments, which are in some states only offered to couples that are not the same gender.
Treatments for HIV, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says disproportionately affects gay and bisexual men, are sometimes shortchanged by insurance plans.
“Some HIV drugs may be outright not covered by insurance at all, or may be covered with copays or deductibles that make the drug essentially inaccessible,” Suffredini said. “It’s like the functional equivalent of denying coverage altogether.”
Small business
Not all workers are protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which only applies to business with 15 employees or more. But some states have laws that do cover those workers.
Fifteen states have nondiscrimination laws that cover all employers, regardless of size, according to Freedom for All Americans. Another 22 states have laws that cover workers at employers with at least two employees or more.
Connecticut, for example, extends the protections to workplaces with at least three employees, and Arkansas extends it to employers with nine, Freedom for All Americans said.
Uniforms
Dress codes and uniforms can present challenges for transgender employees. Rachel Mosby, who was the fire chief in Byron, Georgia, says she was fired from her job after she began showing up to work in feminine dress suits and skirts instead of one of the masculine suits she had been wearing for the last decade. Mosby spent more than $500 of fire department money on the suits, but was issued a written reprimand and required to pay the department back. When she bought herself male suits a decade earlier, there had been no issue.
“These implicit biases and systemic discrimination against people that are others, none of that has gone away,” Mosby said. “It’s still there, and that’s what we have to fight against. That’s what we have to work to remove from our system.”
In their ruling, the Supreme Court judges made clear that they weren’t going to make a call on whether a business can fire an employee for religious reasons, leaving that an open question.
“It kind of punted on those issues and said we can address these at a later date,” said Todd Anten, a lawyer at Quinn Emanuel.
Employers that have religious objections to employing LGBTQ people might be able to raise those claims in a different case, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court.
Bathrooms
Another issue the Supreme Court said it wouldn’t decide this week: same-sex bathrooms and locker rooms.
Jerame Davis, executive director of LGBTQ workplace advocacy group Pride at Work, said employers right now have a lot of leeway in how they respond if a colleague doesn’t want a transgender person to use the same restroom or locker room as them. Often times, the transgender person is singled out and asked to use a different facility, which isn’t ideal, Davis said.
“We shouldn’t be singling out individuals,” he said.
Parental leave
Most workers in the U.S. do not have access to paid family leave to care for a newborn. But among those that have access to family leave, the policies often favor birth mothers, said Gabriel Dobson, 34, a gay man who is married to another man.
Dobson left his last job because he felt his employer was not promoting him because he is black and gay. Now, at a company that’s more culturally inclusive, Dobson is facing subtler challenges. His new company offers 16 weeks of family leave to a mother who gives birth to a child, but only four weeks to a parent who did not give birth. That’s making him wonder how he and his husband would manage if they adopt a child.
“When you are both non-birth parents and you have a child, who is going to get that time off to take care of the child?” Dobson asked. “It makes you feel like your situation is odd, when that’s not typically how I feel about my situation.”
Recognizing LGBTQ workers
Many employers may not know how many LGBTQ people it employs, which makes it hard to make sure they’re invited or included in particular programs.
Some big employers do allow employees to indicate on their human resources forms that they are LGBTQ, like they do for gender and race, said M.V. Lee Badgett, an economics professor and co-director of the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“I think employers that are trying to be proactive and are looking at gender gaps or maybe racial wage gaps, they should try to think about ways that they could do the same for LGBT people,” Badgett said.
Almost every queer teen in America has been bullied because of their sexual orientation or gender identity under the Trump administration, a new study has found.
It is well-documented that LGBT+ young people are more likely that their straight counterparts to experience bullying, and are at a greater risk of developing mental health problems such as depression and eating disorders.
But a new study showed that the problem is worse than previously thought.
It found that 91 per cent of LGBT+ youth had experienced bias-based bullying, almost every queer teen in America, doubling estimates from previous research which surveyed predominantly heterosexual youth.
On top of being bullied for their gender identity or sexual orientation, researchers also found the 73 per cent of queer youth were targeted by bullies for other reasons, for example their weight (57 per cent), race or ethnicity (30 per cent) or religion (27 per cent).
Each type of bullying was found to have negative health consequences — both physical and mental — including stress, sleep problems, depression and unhealthy weight behaviours.
Gay-Straight Alliances ‘may be able to reduce bullying’.
The study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine by researchers at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut.
Lead author Leah Lessard, a postdoctoral fellow at the Rudd Center, said: “The harmful effects and wide range of bias-based bullying experienced by sexual and gender minority (SGM) youth calls attention to the importance of promoting broad-reaching inclusion and acceptance within schools.”
She added: “When considering approaches to reduce health risk, we need to better understand the wide range of bias-based bullying experienced by SGM adolescents.
“Given that multiple forms of bias-based bullying can worsen negative health behaviours, it is critical to understand how school-based interventions, such as Gay Straight Alliances (GSAs), may be able to reduce targeted bullying.”
The researchers found that GSAs in schools and reduced all types of bullying, am were a “promising avenue to support healthy outcomes” for queer teens.
LGBTQ advocates rejoiced Monday after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an unexpectedly broad ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — specifically, Title VII of the act, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of sex — bars employment discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.
Chase Strangio, deputy director of Trans Justice at the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, called the ruling “a truly important rebuke” of conservative efforts to roll back LGBTQ legal protections established during the Obama administration.
“This is a major blow to the interpretation that anti-trans forces are looking to advance,” Strangio said. “You kind of forget that positive, good things can happen sometimes.”
The court said Title VII also covers sexual orientation and transgender status, upholding lower court rulings that said sexual orientation discrimination was a form of sex discrimination. The decision was written Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four more liberal members to form a 6-3 majority.
Of the three plaintiffs whose cases led to Monday’s landmark ruling, only one survives: Gerald Bostock, the Georgia state employee who was fired after it was discovered that he joined a gay softball league.
“Today, we can go to work without the fear of being fired for who we are and who we love,” Bostock said in a statement. “Yet, there is more work to be done. Discrimination has no place in this world, and I will not rest until we have equal rights for all.”
Aimee Stephens, the transgender woman who sued after she was fired from her job at a Michigan funeral home, died last month of kidney disease. Donald Zarda, a New York skydiving instructor who was fired in 2010 after telling a tandem dive customer that he was gay, died in a BASE-jumping accident in 2014.
“There are no words to describe what I’m feeling at this present moment,” Donna Stephens, Aimee’s widow, said.
“I know that the last seven years of Aimee’s life, she rose as a leader who fought against discrimination against transgender people,” she said. “I am so grateful for this victory, to honor the legacy of Aimee.”
Melissa Zarda, Donald’s sister, said the ruling was “the very best way to honor my brother’s memory and legacy,” saying that he sued because he “wanted to ensure nobody else went through what he did.”
“Millions of LGBTQ Americans still live in fear of losing their job because of who they are or who they love, so this decision is welcome news,” said Rep. Chris Pappas, D-N.H., who is gay. “The Supreme Court confirmed that there must be equal justice under the law for LGBTQ Americans in the workplace. This decision gives our community dignity and legal recourse should our civil rights be violated.”
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden called Monday’s decision “a momentous step forward for our country.”
“Before today, in more than half of states, LGBTQ+ people could get married one day and be fired from their job the next day under state law, simply because of who they are or who they love,” Biden said, vowing to sign the Equality Act into law if elected president.
The Williams Institute, an LGBTQ research center at UCLA Law School, estimated that the ruling protects an estimated 8.1 million working-age LGBTQ people in the United States: 7.1 million lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer people, and 1 million transgender people.
Of those people, 3.4 million lesbian, gay and bisexual workers and over a half million transgender workers gain immediate new protections from Monday’s ruling because they live in one of the 27 states without any pre-existing LGBTQ workplace discriminations.
“The ruling ensures a blanket of employment protections for LGBTQ people rather than the inadequate patchwork that has all but stopped at the borders of Southern states,” the Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, executive director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, said of the estimated 5 million LGBTQ people living in the South. “For LGBTQ Southerners, the decision shows yet again that that no one should face discrimination because of who they are or who they love.”
Some advocates, however, warned that there was still work to be done, and that while Monday’s Title VII ruling establishes a reading of sex discrimination that will significantly expand the scope of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, more legislation is still needed.
“I think the Bostock ruling will eventually control the definition of sex in every federal civil rights bill or law that includes sex, but the challenge here is that there are some contexts where there are gaps in federal law, and we need to fill those gaps,” James Esseks, director of the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project, said.
He added that the Equality Act — which would explicitly add sexual orientation and gender identity to a variety of pre-existing civil rights laws — “would fill that gap” by barring discrimination in public accommodations, jury duty and some other areas left out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Even as the Bostock decision signals the end of the legal argument that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination does not bar discrimination against LGBTQ people, Esseks said there is already a new anti-LGBTQ legal argument making its way through lower courts.
“I think the next tactic by opponents of LGBTQ equality is to claim that religious freedom gives them a license to discriminate against LGBTQ people,” Esseks said. “And that is an endeavor that is already well underway.”
The Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBTQ employees from being discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The court on Monday issued opinions on two major decisions with far-reaching implications for the civil rights of transgender and LGBTQ individuals.
It was a 6-3 ruling, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the four liberal justices in the majority.
Writing for the majority, Gorsuch argued that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is fundamentally no different than discrimination based on sex.
“An individual’s homosexuality or transgender status is not relevant to employment decisions,” Gorsuch wrote. “That’s because it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
“We agree that homosexuality and transgender status are distinct concepts from sex,” he added later. “But, as we’ve seen, discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender status necessarily entails discrimination based on sex; the first cannot happen without the second.”
The rulings rest on a pair of arguments the court heard in October in which justices considered whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal law that prohibits workplace discrimination, applies to LGBTQ and transgender workers.
Discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender status necessarily entails discrimination based on sex; the first cannot happen without the second.Justice Neil Gorsuch
While Title VII bars discrimination on the basis of “race, color, national origin, sex, and religion,” the original bill didn’t define “sex” as a term. The Trump administration used that ambiguity to argue that lawmakers’ original intent focused solely on protecting women’s rights and, therefore, shouldn’t be extended to include sexual orientation or gender identity.
“The issue is not whether Congress can or should prohibit employment discrimination because of sexual orientation,” Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco, who represented the Trump administration, argued. “The issue, rather, is whether it did so when it prohibited discrimination because of sex.”
Questions posed by members of the court’s conservative majority in October suggested they largely agreed and believed the remedy should be legislative, not judicial.
“If the court takes this up and interprets this 1964 statute to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation,” Justice Samuel Alito said, “we will be acting exactly like a legislature.”
Justice Alito returned to that theme in a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
“There is only one word for what the Court has done today: legislation,” Alito wrote. “The document that the Court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive.”
Near the end of arguments in October, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a member of the court’s liberal bloc, appeared to argue that Title VII should indeed be used to protect groups that historically have faced discrimination.
“We can’t deny that homosexuals are being fired merely for being who they are and not because of religious reasons, not because they are performing their jobs poorly, not because they can’t do whatever is required of a position,” she said, “but merely because they’re a suspect class to some people.”
The Supreme Court reached the decision after considering a trio of cases all filed in 2018.
Transgender activist Aimee Stephens sits in her wheelchair outside the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., October 8, 2019.
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In Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda, a Long Island skydiving instructor named Don Zarda was fired after telling a client he was gay. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled Zarda’s firing was discriminatory, the 11th Circuit ruled the opposite way in a similar case, Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, in which plaintiff Gerald Bostock said he was fired after joining a gay recreational softball team.
“There are truly no words to describe just how elated I am,” Bostock said in a statement Monday. “When I was fired seven years ago, I was devastated. But this fight became about so much more than me. I am sincerely grateful to the Supreme Court, my attorneys, advocacy organizations like GLAAD, and every person who supported me on this journey.
“Today, we can go to work without the fear of being fired for who we are and who we love. Yet, there is more work to be done. Discrimination has no place in this world, and I will not rest until we have equal rights for all.”
Stephens’ lawyers argued her firing was a clear example of discrimination because of her sex, and the 6th Circuit agreed.
“The unrefuted facts show that the Funeral Home fired Stephens because she refused to abide by her employer’s stereotypical conception of her sex,” the court wrote in a 49-page decision.
“Discrimination against employees, either because of their failure to conform to sex stereotypes or their transgender and transitioning status, is illegal under Title VII,” the court said. “It is analytically impossible to fire an employee based on that employee’s status as a transgender person without being motivated, at least in part, by the employee’s sex.”
Stephens told Vox last year she hoped her lawsuit would encourage others to “always strive to be who you are” regardless of the case’s outcome.
“Deep down you know who you are and don’t let anyone else tell you any different,” she said. “Hold your head high and keep marching forward. It will get better.”
Stephens died on May 12 at the age of 59, after which her wife, Donna, stepped in as the respondent in the case.
Joe Biden spearheaded a blistering backlash against the Trump administration that on Friday (June 12) “cruelly” erased precious healthcare protections for trans patients less than two weeks into Pride Month.
The Department of Health and Human Services finalised a rule that effectively means gender identity is no longer an avenue for sex dissemination in healthcare. It’s part of a slew of policy changes across education, housing and employment to narrow the legal definition of discrimination to not include trans folk.
The presumptive Democratic Party nominee slammed the move, echoing the devastating timing of the move and made a charged rallying cry to “defeat” Trump in the November presidential elections.––
Biden noted that the rule change intersected on the four year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, where a man laid siege on a Latinx queer club that killed 49 people.
He also drew attention to healthcare protections being rolled back in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic as well as it being Pride Month.
Joe Biden: ‘Donald Trump’s cruelty truly knows no bounds.’
“On the fourth anniversary of Pulse,” Biden tweeted to his six million followers, “in the middle of Pride month, during a global pandemic.
On the fourth anniversary of Pulse. In the middle of Pride month. During a global pandemic.
Donald Trump’s cruelty truly knows no bounds. We have to defeat him this November.
“Donald Trump’s cruelty truly knows no bounds. We have to defeat him this November.”
This was amplified by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. He tweeted to his more than 12 million followers: “It is outrageous that Trump, in the middle of a pandemic, is working to prevent LGBTQ+ Americans from getting healthcare they need.
“Discrimination of any kind has no place in our society. We must defeat Trump, guarantee health care as a right and protect all LGBTQ+ Americans”.
Various lawmakers, former Demonostric presidential contenders, city leaders, singers, comedians and variois other public figures joined in the choris of criticism against the move.
The callousness of Trump to announce this during LGBTQ+ Pride month as the country mourns the four year anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting. The cruelty is the point and it knows no bounds.
What does the new ruling mean for trans Americans?
In short, it means that if a trans patient is discriminated on the basis of their gender identity by a doctor, medical facility or their health insurer, there would be little protecting them.
The Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law often known as Obamacare, established broad civil rights protections in health care. It barred discrimination based on race, colour, national origin, sex, age or disability in health programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance.
In 2016, the Obama administration added gender identity to the list. But the rule was revised by Trump officials.
The Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement saying the final rule is based on “the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology.”
“All of these are essentially legislative changes that the Department lacked the authority to make,” the administration said of the 2016 changes in the final rule.
“They purported to impose additional legal requirements on covered entities that cannot be justified by the text of Title IX, and in fact are in conflict with express exemptions in Title IX.”
