SCOTUS rules that civil rights law protects gay and transgender employees: Roberts and Gorsuch?

I think you missed the point in my post....Trump reads and people are surprised

 

That is a key point and could be what separates Gorsuch from Scalia. Eventually, Gorsuch will be involved in what could be a crucial ruling on Roe v. Wade. I'll have a firmer grasp on whether Gorsuch really is more like Kennedy than Scalia when that happens. We'll have to wait and see.

 

I give it a week. There are a lot of controversial cases coming down the pipeline, and I suspect conservatives will go back to loving Gorsuch pretty soon.

 

I think Scalia probably would have voted with Gorsuch. Again, not a ConLaw scholar, but from what I remember about Scalia, he argues that it's too difficult to re-litigate all the inputs that go into making a law. The records are not 100% the picture of what everyone writing and debating the law was thinking, and ultimately, you can't really know what everyone was thinking. There were tons of debates during the Constitutional Convention and the resulting document was a compromise that had many different people thinking different things throughout the process. And as new laws have been written and evolved over the years, it becomes futile to say with certainty "this is what all the lawmakers wanted to do in this situation." So the solution is to go back to the text of the law and rule of what the text explicitly says. And that's Scalia's textualism. And that's why he probably would have voted with the majority here. Any ConLaw scholar please correct me if I'm way off.

 

This is what tends to happen when you appoint really good jurists to the Supreme Court. They decide based on the merits of the arguments.

Liberals will get mad because it prevents legislation from the bench.

Conservatives will get mad because they will side on liberal policies on social justices due to cogent constitutional arguments about the laws in question.

Interestingly, a decidedly conservative court has given sweeping gay rights over the last 10 years, while at the same time not "passing legislation" under the guise of constitutional decisions. Basically its worked really well.

What's the opinion on Judge Roberts? He seems like a pretty straight shooter and pretty "in the middle".

 

Interestingly, the way Gorsuch words this, it doesn't actually have anything to do with sexual preferences - it's literally about discrimination based on gender.

If you're not going to fire a woman who's attracted to men, then you can't fire a man who's attracted to men. It's not the "attracted to men" part that's protected - it's that you have to treat the man and woman equally.

Presumably, this theoretically would allow a business to legally fire both men AND women who were attracted to men, because at that point, you're no longer discriminated based on gender. So you could conceivably have a business that only hires straight men and lesbian women (or vice-versa).

 

So you’re saying there’s a chance?

 

If you are a homophobe in 2020, you have issues.

 

Yeah, the argument to me is kind of screwy. Progressives may applaud his judgment, because it aligns with what they see as justice, but the job of the Supreme Court isn't to decide what is just (in a moral sense) but to decide what the law means.

If an employer is discriminating against a homosexual employee because they are gay, that's not sex or gender discrimination unless they are only discriminating against gay men or gay women. When you bring trans rights into the picture, it gets even more murky because the very concept of sex or gender turns into something that is considered socially constructed. So what does sex/gender discrimination mean there?

 

As a conservative that believes strongly in individual rights, the politicians missed the mark. We don’t need to agree with the lifestyle that differs from us, but we need to safeguard life, liberty and pursuit of happiness otherwise our rights are infringed. Plus many in the gay community are actually pro republican and pro business in many aspects.

 

interesting analysis:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/a..._voted_with_liberals_on_lgbt_case_143456.html

 

Don't you also believe in segregation?