WASHINGTON (CN) — In a landmark 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that federal anti-discrimination protections apply to employees who are gay and transgender.
“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,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the six-justice majority. “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”
At issue in the dispute is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, among other things, bars discrimination “because of sex.” The Supreme Court has applied that prohibition in several other contexts, but Monday marks the first time it has weighed in on whether the protections extend to gay and transgender people.
In a 33-page opinion, Gorsuch, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote while the people who drafted Title VII likely would not have thought the law would cover gay or transgender people, the words they put to paper make clear that it does.
“But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands,” Gorsuch wrote. “When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.”
Gorsuch was joined in the majority by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Justice Samuel Alito penned a dissent in the case, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. Gorsuch’s fellow Trump appointee, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, authored a separate dissent as well.
LGBTQ rights advocates praised the majority’s decision on Monday, hailing it as a significant victory for gay and transgender equality.
Virginia Delegate Danica Roem, the first transgender person elected to the state’s House of Delegates, said the decision accounts for fundamental differences in how LGBTQ people are treated in employment.
“If you look at this just on the words, what’s before you, a straight person is held to a different standard than the LGBTQ person,” Roem said in a phone interview. “That’s the point. That cannot stay. It is not okay to hold a straight person to a different standard for employment than an LGBTQ person.”
James Esseks, the director of the LGBTQ & HIV Project at the ACLU, which represented two of the employees in the cases, said Monday’s decision is the culmination of decades of advocacy work.
“The court has caught up to the majority of our country, which already knows that discriminating against LGBTQ people is both unfair and against the law,” Esseks said in a statement.
The ruling comes in a trio of cases the court considered across two hours of oral argument in October.
One case concerns Gerald Lynn Bostock, who headed the Court Appointed Special Advocates program in Clayton County, Ga. Though he generally received positive performance reviews, the county fired Bostock in June 2013, shortly after he started promoting “Hotlanta,” a gay softball league in which he played.
The court heard Bostock’s claims alongside those of Donald Zarda, a gay skydiving instructor in New York. Zarda often did tandem jumps with customers, requiring him to be strapped tightly to a new jumper.
The company fired Zarda after a female customer complained about a joke he cracked, leading him to bring a suit claiming the company fired him because he was gay. Zarda died in a BASE-jumping accident while his case was pending.
The court also ruled Monday in the case of Aimee Stephens, a former employee at Harris Funeral Homes in Michigan. Stephens was hired before she came out as transgender, but in 2013, after undertaking treatment with a therapist, told the owner of the funeral home she wanted to live openly as a woman, with plans to undergo sex-reassignment surgery.