Trump DOJ: Businesses Can Discriminate Against LGBT Workers

The Trump/Pence regime's war against LGBT Americans continues and the Trump Department of Justice filed a brief in a case pending before the Supreme Court  arguing that businesses can freely discriminate against LGBT workers without violating federal laws.  The move comes just days after the regime announced that it wants to define gender as one's physical attributes at birth - a total rejection of medical and mental health knowledge on transgender individuals who would technically cease to exist. Most amazing is the fact that despite all this anti-LGBT animus, "friends" remain surprised that I vigorously oppose the Trump/Pence regime and, by extension, its homophobic supporters.  A piece Bloomberg looks at this latest effort to make LGBT individuals the targets of animus and bigotry.  Here are excerpts:

The Justice Department today told the U.S. Supreme Court that businesses can discriminate against workers based on their gender identity without violating federal law.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the high court that a civil rights law banning sex discrimination on the job doesn’t cover transgender bias. That approach already has created a rift within the Trump administration, contradicting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s view of the law it’s tasked with enforcing.

A Michigan funeral home wants the high court to overturn a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit decision finding that the company violated federal workplace discrimination law when it fired Aimee Stephens, a transgender worker. The EEOC successfully sued on behalf of Stephens in that case, but the Justice Department has the sole authority to represent the government before the Supreme Court. The DOJ told the high court that the Sixth Circuit got the case wrong.

“The court of appeals misread the statute and this Court’s decisions in concluding that Title VII encompasses discrimination on the basis of gender identity,” Francisco said in a brief filed with the court.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide in the coming months whether to take up the case. It’s also been asked to consider two other cases testing whether sexual orientation bias is a form of sex discrimination banned under the existing law.

The DOJ’s brief follows a New York Times report that the Department of Health and Human Services is considering limiting its definition of gender to sex assigned at birth.

“This administration is not a friend of the LGBT community,” Greg Nevins, an attorney for Lambda Legal, told Bloomberg Law. “They can say what they’re going to say, but the courts will have the final word.”  The American Civil Liberties Union has intervened in the case and will represent Stephens if the high court decides to grant the funeral home’s request for review.

With its ruling in the funeral home case, the Sixth Circuit last year became the first federal appeals court in the country to conclude that transgender bias is sex discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It previously recognized transgender discrimination as a form of prohibited sex stereotyping. . . . “It is analytically impossible to fire an employee based on that employee’s status as a transgender person without being motivated, at least in part, by the employee’s sex,” Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote for the Sixth Circuit.

Laws in 20 states and Washington, D.C., directly ban employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

In Virginia, thanks to Republicans in the General Assembly, there are ZERO non-discrimination protections for LGBT Virginians as I know first hand after being forced from a law firm a number of years ago for being gay.