6 important passages from Justice Gorsuch’s Supreme Court ruling on LGBTQ rights

The statue Authority of Law by sculptor James Earle Fraser stands on the steps of the US Supreme Court.Chip Somodevilla/Getty

When the 6-3 Supreme Court ruling came down on Monday affirming that it is illegal for employers to discriminate against LGBTQ employees, many were surprised by the author of the court’s 31-page opinion: Justice Neil Gorsuch, an appointee of President Trump. In his opinion, the conservative Gorsuch argued that to discriminate against someone based on their sexual orientation or gender identity is to discriminate against them on the basis of sex, which is illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Here are six of the most important passages from the ruling.

Gorsuch writes that the question at issue is ‘no contest’

“Sometimes small gestures can have unexpected consequences. Major initiatives practically guarantee them. In our time, few pieces of federal legislation rank in significance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There, in Title VII, Congress outlawed discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. 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. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids. Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result. Likely, they weren’t thinking about many of the Act’s consequences that have become apparent over the years, including its prohibition against discrimination on the basis of motherhood or its ban on the sexual harassment of male employees. But the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. 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 explains that the Civil Rights Act’s focus on individuals is critical to the case

“Suppose an employer fires a woman for refusing his sexual advances. It’s no defense for the employer to note that, while he treated that individual woman worse than he would have treated a man, he gives preferential treatment to female employees overall. The employer is liable for treating this woman worse in part because of her sex. Nor is it a defense for an employer to say it discriminates against both men and women because of sex. This statute works to protect individuals of both sexes from discrimination, and does so equally. So an employer who fires a woman, Hannah, because she is insufficiently feminine and also fires a man, Bob, for being insufficiently masculine may treat men and women as groups more or less equally. But in both cases the employer fires an individual in part because of sex. Instead of avoiding Title VII exposure, this employer doubles it.”

Gorsuch describes how discriminating against LGBTQ people means discriminating on the basis of sex

“Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague. . . Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision.”

Gorsuch disputes arguments made by the dissenting opinions of Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh

“Because homosexuality and transgender status can’t be found on that list and because they are conceptually distinct from sex, the employers reason, they are implicitly excluded from Title VII’s reach. Put another way, if Congress had wanted to address these matters in Title VII, it would have referenced them specifically. . . But that much does not follow. We agree that homosexuality and transgender status are distinct concepts from sex. But, as we’ve seen, discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender status necessarily entails discrimination based on sex; the first cannot happen without the second.”

Gorsuch bats down the employers’ argument that no one could have expected the Civil Rights Act to apply to LGBTQ people

“Often lurking just behind such objections resides a cynicism that Congress could not possibly have meant to protect a disfavored group. Take this Court’s encounter with the Americans with Disabilities Act’s directive that no ‘public entity’ can discriminate against any ‘qualified individual with a disability.’. . . Congress, of course, didn’t list every public entity the statute would apply to. And no one batted an eye at its application to, say, post offices. But when the statute was applied to prisons, curiously, some demanded a closer look: Pennsylvania argued that ‘Congress did not ‘envisio[n] that the ADA would be applied to state prisoners.’ . . .This Court emphatically rejected that view,” Gorsuch wrote. “As Yeskey and today’s cases exemplify, applying protective laws to groups that were politically unpopular at the time of the law’s passage—whether prisoners in the 1990s or homosexual and transgender employees in the 1960s—often may be seen as unexpected. But to refuse enforcement just because of that, because the parties before us happened to be unpopular at the time of the law’s passage, would not only require us to abandon our role as interpreters of statutes; it would tilt the scales of justice in favor of the strong or popular and neglect the promise that all persons are entitled to the benefit of the law’s terms.”

Gorsuch uses Yankees fans to argue that firing someone for multiple reasons doesn’t matter, if one of those reasons is the person’s sex

“Consider an employer with a policy of firing any woman he discovers to be a Yankees fan. Carrying out that rule because an employee is a woman and a fan of the Yankees is a firing “because of sex” if the employer would have tolerated the same allegiance in a male employee. Likewise here.”