Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

From today’s NPR News Online:

The Supreme Court has accepted three cases that ask whether federal anti-discrimination laws should apply to sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace, putting the court on track to consider high-profile LGBTQ issues after its next term begins this fall.

Two of the cases — Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, and Altitude Express, Inc. v. Zarda — were consolidated because both include claims that employers discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation. A third — R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC — involves the question of whether existing discrimination laws apply to transgender workers.

The Supreme Court granted petitions for writs of certiorari for the three cases Monday morning, adding them to their workload for the term that will start in October — meaning any decisions and opinions will emerge in the runup to the national election in 2020.

But the court also set limits as it accepted the cases. As the court’s order list states, the scope of the court’s review of the Harris Funeral Homes case is limited to only question “whether Title VII prohibits discrimination against transgender people based on (1) their status as transgender or (2) sex stereotyping” under the 1989 decision in the Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins case.

The Supreme Court’s order refers to Title VII, the part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and national origin. In recent years, lower federal courts have disagreed on whether the same protections should apply to people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. That divide can be seen in the trio of cases now up for review.

“In two of the cases, lower courts sided with the plaintiffs,” NPR’s Leila Fadel reports for our Newscast unit, “one in Michigan where a transgender woman was fired from her job at a funeral home based on her gender identity; another, out of New York where a skydiving instructor was allegedly fired because he’s gay. But in a third case in Georgia, a gay man who was fired from his job as a child welfare services coordinator lost.”

In that third case, the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit turned away an appeal from Gerald Lynn Bostock last summer. Even before Bostock’s appeal request was declined by the full panel, his attorneys already had asked the Supreme Court to weigh in.

Read the complete article here.

By Editor