The Supreme Court delivered what many are calling the first good news of 2020 by handing President Donald Trump’s administration three major defeats in one day.
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court decreed that protections against sex discrimination in the workplace also cover discrimination against LGBT+ persons. Hearing two cases of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and one on the basis of transgender status, the court found that
“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”
The ruling goes against the Trump administration, which has previously sided with the employers.
The Supreme Court also refused to take up the close to a dozen cases challenging different states’ gun control measures and a challenge from the Trump administration to California’s sanctuary laws.
Trump has long been an advocate of fewer restrictions on firearms, going so far as to warn Virginians that with stricter gun control laws they would have no way to guard their potatoes from marauding potato thieves.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to even hear these cases shows Second Amendment rights’ expansion is not on the court’s docket.
Similarly California’s position of non-cooperation with federal authorities on immigration has long been a thorn in the side of an administration billing itself as tough on undocumented immigration.
The refusal to entertain this challenge, with even Trump’s two appointees to the court siding against him, is a major blow to Trump’s war on undocumented immigrants.
Online, the rulings were cheered as the new decade’s first good news.
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