Pamela Karlan, the attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the landmark Supreme Court case that ruled in favor of LGBTQ workplace protections, asserted on Monday that the stunning victory was a result of simply following the law as written.
During an interview on MSNBC, Karlan said the blockbuster decision “follows directly from the text of Title VII” in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“Title VII says you can’t fire a worker because of that worker’s sex,” she explained. “If you have two workers named Bobby, one of whom is male and one is female, and you fire the male worker named Bobby because he marries somebody named Pete but you don’t fire the female worker for marrying somebody named Pete, that’s sex discrimination, pure and simple.”
The attorney asserted that the six justices who sided with her clients, including Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, “took the text of Title VII seriously” instead of basing their decision on what the lawmakers behind the Civil Rights Act may have intended.
“Because whatever [the lawmakers] intended to do, the words they wrote cover lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers the same as every other worker,” Karlan said.
As to why Gorsuch made the surprising move and even wrote the majority opinion, Karlan said that “textualists” like Gorsuch will put aside personal politics to follow the law as written.
“Justice Gorsuch was not making a statement about what he would have done if he had been in Congress in 1964,” the lawyer said. “He was making a statement about what the words Congress used in 1964 mean.”
Watch Karlan below:
Lawyer for plaintiffs in SCOTUS' LGBTQ case explains why they won: The justices "took the text of Title VII seriously." pic.twitter.com/CyCwjGvnFn
— TPM Livewire (@TPMLiveWire) June 15, 2020
Question for fellow commenters: Recall Indianapolis Catholic high schools firing gay teachers who married?
My former hs, Brebeuf Prep, resisted and was expelled from the Indy diocese. The others opted to fire teachers.
Do these teachers have recourse under this decision, or does being private religious schools exempt their employers?
“Why did we win? Because we got six votes!”
Seriously, kudos to Prof. Karlan and those with her. And to the plaintiffs, who suffered so much (one died before the ruling), and waited so long.
Cuz it was the right thing to do?
Yes that Prof. Karlan.
This is what the winner always says. Of course, the losers also say their rejected position is a result of following the text of the law as written:
The idea that judges simply follow textualist principles and arrive at an inevitable result is pure fantasy.
More commonly, the result is chosen first and the reasoning follows afterwards.