WASHINGTON — In a landmark decision in a case brought by a transgender Michigan woman who died last month, the U.S. Supreme Court held Monday federal law prohibits firing someone for simply being homosexual or transgender.
Aimee Stephens, who was fired from her job at R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Home in Garden City in 2013 after she said she would begin dressing as a woman at work, had brought the case arguing that she was protected under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. The funeral home owner argued that since he would have required anyone to dress according to the gender they had been biologically assigned at birth, he hadn't discriminated against her.
More: Ex-funeral home worker’s case going to Supreme Court, raising question whether 1964 law covers gender identity
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court, upheld a lower court's decision in favor of Stephens, saying the federal law protected employees from being fired based on their sexual or gender orientation because that cannot be separated from discrimination based on sexual stereotypes.
"The answer is clear," Gorsuch wrote. "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."
Stephens, 59, died last month while awaiting the decision.
Donna Stephens, who was married to Aimee for 20 years, issued a statement through the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped bring the case, saying Aimee spent the last seven years of her life fighting for transgender rights. "I am grateful for this victory to honor the legacy of Aimee, and to ensure people are treated fairly regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity," she said.
Jay Kaplan, with the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan LGBT Project, called on Congress and the Michigan Legislature to pass laws explicitly protecting people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It was also not immediately clear what effect, if any, the decision would have on a Michigan petition drive to add LBGTQ protections to the state's civil rights law.
The ruling, which was under the title Bostock vs. Clayton County, Georgia, consolidated three cases, including two others from Georgia and New York involving employment actions against gay men. Stephens, 59, died last month as she was awaiting the decision.
It came five years after another decision in a group of consolidated cases, including one involving a Michigan couple, April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, which legalized same-sex marriages nationwide. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel was the lawyer for DeBoer and Rowse in that case.
Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, a Washington-based organization that advocates for women's rights, praised Monday's decision as a "historic affirmation of the humanity and dignity deserved by every person regardless of who they are or who they love."
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued a statement in support of the decision as well, saying. "Nobody deserves to lose their job because of who they are or how they identify."
Meanwhile, John Bursch, a west Michigan lawyer and former state solicitor general who argued for the funeral home owner's position before the Supreme Court last October, criticized the ruling.
“Americans must be able to rely on what the law says, and it is disappointing that a majority of the justices were unwilling to affirm that commonsense principle," Bursch said on behalf of the Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based group whose website says it fights for Christian values. "Redefining ‘sex’ to mean ‘gender identity’ will create chaos and enormous unfairness for women and girls in athletics, women’s shelters, and many other contexts."
Gorsuch says transgender, homosexual discrimination comes down to sex
In his ruling, Gorsuch noted the turmoil Stephens faced before sending a letter to Thomas Rost, the owner of the funeral home where she worked for six years, telling him she was going to begin dressing as a woman at work, having already made that transition away from work. At one point, Stephens earlier told the Free Press, she had considered talking her life.
"When she got the job, Ms. Stephens presented as a male. But two years into her
service with the company, she began treatment for despair and loneliness," Gorsuch wrote. Ultimately, clinicians diagnosed her with gender dysphoria and recommended that she begin living as a woman. In her sixth year with the company, Ms. Stephens wrote a letter to her employer explaining that she planned to 'live and work full-time as a woman' after she returned from an upcoming vacation. The funeral home fired her before she left, telling her 'this is not going to work out.'”
While acknowledging that Congress didn't specifically mention homosexual or transgender individuals in the 1964 law, that didn't limit it from prohibiting discrimination against them, as the employers had also argued. He said it still comes down to a question of sex and sexual stereotypes, which cannot be used as a reason for discrimination.
"When an employer fires an employee for being homosexual or transgender, it necessarily intentionally discriminates against that individual in part because of sex," he wrote.
"Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result," he continued. "Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the act’s consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. ... Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit."
Decision came as something of a surprise, given court's conservative tilt
The decision came as something of a surprise, given that Gorsuch is widely considered a conservative justice, having been nominated by President Donald Trump and with the court considered to have more conservative members, 5, than liberal ones.
In writing the majority decision, Gorsuch was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagen.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanuagh opposed the decision. Alito wrote a dissent, in which he was joined by Thomas, in which he said, "There is only one word for what the court has done today: legislation."
"The court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous," Alito continued. "Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination because of 'sex' is different from discrimination because of 'sexual orientation' or 'gender identity.' And in any event, our duty is to interpret statutory terms to 'mean what they conveyed to reasonable people at the time they were written.'”
Kavanaugh, in a separate dissent, sounded a similar theme, saying, "Under the Constitution’s separation of powers, the responsibility to amend Title VII belongs to Congress and the president in the legislative process, not to this court."
Gorsuch said if Congress wanted to include exceptions to broad rules prohibiting discrimination based on sex, it could have but didn't. And "when Congress chooses not to include any exceptions to a broad rule, courts apply the broad rule. And that is exactly how this court has always approached Title VII. 'Sexual harassment' is conceptually
distinct from sex discrimination, but it can fall within (the law's) sweep... Same with 'motherhood discrimination.'"
"Would the employers have us reverse those cases on the theory that Congress could have spoken to those problems more specifically?" he wrote. "Of course not. As enacted, Title VII prohibits all forms of discrimination because of sex, however they may manifest themselves or whatever other labels might attach to them."
Rights groups, advocates still pressing for more protections
The decision is a momentous change in applying federal civil rights protections to gay, lesbian and transgender employees, effectively prohibiting discrimination in hiring, benefits, job assignments, pay, promotion, layoff and firing based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Gorsuch and the majority stopped short, however, of saying whether the decision necessarily affects rules allowing sex-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms or dress codes in generally. "(None) of these other laws are before us; we have not had the benefit of adversarial testing about the meaning of their terms, and we do not prejudge
any such question today," Gorsuch wrote.
LBGTQ advocates and allies, meanwhile, said they will continue to push for changes that would prohibit discrimination in housing rights, health care and other areas.
Alphonso David, president of Human Rights Campaign, a Washington-based LGBTQ advocacy group, said, "In many aspects of the public square, LGBTQ people still lack non-discrimination protections, which is why it is crucial that Congress pass the Equality Act to address the significant gaps in federal civil rights laws and improve protections for everyone.”
In Michigan, state Sen. Jeremy Moss, D-Southfield, who is gay, said in a post on Twitter that the state Civil Rights Commission had been investigating LGBTQ discrimination claims as sex discrimination already and the decision upholds that. "We still need to extend these now-affirmed employment protections to housing & public accommodations," he said.
Oakland County Executive Dave Coulter, who is also gay, called the decision "a major victory for equality and fairness in our country. No one should be fired simply for whom they love, and today America took an important step forward toward a more just and perfect union."
Contact Todd Spangler at tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @tsspangler. Read more on Michigan politics and sign up for our elections newsletter. Staff writer Paul Egan contributed to this story.
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