Bostock v. Clayton County

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2020 United States Supreme Court case

Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020), is a landmark [1] United States Supreme Court civil rights decision in which the Court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity .

The plaintiff, Gerald Bostock, was fired from his county job after he expressed interest in a gay softball league at work. The lower courts followed the Eleventh Circuit 's past precedent that Title VII did not cover employment discrimination based on sexual orientation . The case was consolidated with _Altitude Express, Inc. v. Zarda _, a similar case of apparent discrimination due to sexual orientation from the Second Circuit , but which had added to a circuit split . Oral arguments were heard on October 8, 2019, alongside _R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission _, a similar question of Title VII discrimination relating to transgender persons.

On June 15, 2020, the Court ruled in a 6–3 decision covering all three cases that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is necessarily also discrimination "because of sex" as prohibited by Title VII. According to Justice Neil Gorsuch 's majority opinion, that is so because employers discriminating against gay or transgender employees accept a certain characteristic (e.g., attraction to women) in employees of one sex but not in employees of the other sex.

The ruling has been hailed as one of the most important legal decisions regarding LGBTQ rights in the United States , along with _Lawrence v. Texas _ (2003) and _Obergefell v. Hodges _ (2015).[2] Many legal analysts claimed that the case defined Gorsuch as a textualist in statutory interpretation .[3]

Background

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Legislation and prior case law

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed into law amid the civil rights movement . It had been proposed by President John F. Kennedy as a means to combat racial discrimination and racial segregation in the aftermath of the Birmingham campaign . After Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson advocated passage of the Civil Rights Act in the following year.[4]

Among several provisions in the law is Title VII , which covers equal employment opportunities. Its key provision, codified at 42 U.S.C.  § 2000e-2(a)(1) , states that it is illegal to discriminate in any hiring or employment practices based on an "individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin". To enforce this requirement, Title VII established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a federal agency based on an office Kennedy had established with Executive Order 10925 , to help oversee any reported employment discrimination and file lawsuits against entities that the EEOC believes have discriminated in the employment context. In addition, the EEOC may make its own determination on cases rather than taking these to court. These decisions do not carry the weight of case law, but the Supreme Court does consider the weight of the EEOC opinions as the EEOC "constitute[s] a body of experience and informed judgment to which courts and litigants may properly resort for guidance".[5]

The nature of protected classes under § 2000e-2(a)(1) have been refined through case law over the years. Three key Supreme Court cases prior to Bostock had considered the aspect of "sex" in the context of the statute:[6]

• _Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson _, 477 U.S. 57 (1986), which ruled that sexual harassment was considered a form of unlawful discrimination under Title VII;
• _Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins _, 490 U.S. 228 (1989), which determined that gender stereotyping was also a form of discrimination under Title VII and thus unlawful; and
• _Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc. _, 523 U.S. 75 (1998), which further refined Meritor Savings Bank that sexual harassment between members of the same sex was also considered unlawful discrimination.

LGBTQ employment protections

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Main article: LGBTQ employment discrimination in the United States

Until Bostock, whether the Civil Rights Act gave federal protection against employment discrimination to the class of LGBTQ people was in dispute. Individual states since 1973 acted on their own accord to extend employment discrimination protections to explicitly cover LGBTQ employees, and before the Bostock decision, 21 states had included LGBTQ as a protected class against employment discrimination, while other states offered some but less extensive protections in their laws. States with such protections often have a state-level board that performs functions equivalent to the EEOC, and which will work with the EEOC to unify employment discrimination regulations. Numerous local governments passed similar LGBTQ employment discrimination statutes as well.[7]

Since 1994, members of the Democratic Party in the U.S. Congress have introduced some form of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in nearly every two-year term, which would have amended the Civil Rights Act to include both sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under Title VII at the federal level and thus applying across the entire country. Passage of these bills has generally failed because lack of support among Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives.[8] More recent

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