SCOTUS rules that discrimination in employment under Title VII includes sexual orientation

Thoughts?

 

Still processing and listening to various analyses.

 

Alito's dissent is 150+ pages.

Kavangaugh's dissent is shorter, and better as a dissent.

I'm trying to think of it from God's perspective. "Question: Does God treat the homosexual, bisexual, transgender, gender fluid, gender self-identifier any differently from the perspective of grace than He treats the heterosexual?" Or, "Should the Christian treat the non-heterosexual any differently from the way he/she treats a heterosexual in any arena?"

Gorsuch's opinion is a traditional, conservative, textual look at the LAW, not a public opinion. I haven't digested all of it, but Alito's dissent goes a bit too far, although I agree that SCOTUS probably did jump ahead of the legislative process, and I'm generally not happy with that.

 

As the resident not-a-tranny, not-an-American what's the significance of the ruling? Is this a case of not discriminating, or does it open the door to all sorts of frivolous lawsuits?

 

Yes.

It is a ruling that says, in employment matters, you can't discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or being transgendered, and yes, it will open the floodgates for litigation, many of which will be legit (now) and many of which will be frivolous.

 

It is fascinating watching the left's various issues start to run over each other. What is a woman? Therefore, where do women's rights stand? I wish it was only a television show or a novel.

 

They have as low a view of women as anyone in history; on the one hand women have been treated like garbage, and on the other hand, they should be treated just like anyone else because they're reducible to a few sex characterists and not really that different from men after all. Just look at how they're going at Rowling.

Right, so it will go from a completely sane "why do you care about these personal details of your employees?" to "it's discriminatory not to let 90lb identifies-as-male work as a security guard in a supermax prison". (Continuing to lose sight of the reality that some discrimination is beneficiary.)

 

I can't see why it would matter, except in very specific situations, whether an employee was gay or straight. On that basis I struggle to see why employment protection should be denied to people based on sexual orientation. It seems to me that "don't ask, don't tell" is pretty good advice where sex is concerned, whatever your orientation, although with the observation that as work relationships can become at least somewhat social it's natural to make reference to a life partner even if only in passing. It's hard to see why referring to a partner with language indicating they are the same sex should be offensive to anyone but if people feel uneasy they can always refer to "my partner".

Gender identity is much more of a minefield. Truth be told I'm surprised the feminist agenda hasn't clashed with the gender identity agenda and, in many ways, I'm surprised the issues relating to gender identity haven't appeared as problems with the gay agenda.

I can only imagine the howling that would follow if, say, a class of 16-year-old girls were supervised in the shower after gym class by a male teacher. Does it change anything if the male teacher (by which I mean a teacher with male anatomy) declares himself to be female? According to some proponents of fully supporting the individual's gender identity we must conclude that the teacher becomes female at that point and the young girls should just accept "her" watching them as they shower. Of course a related question is why a similar outcry would be avoided if that male teacher was gay and supervising 16-year-old boys showering after gym class. Perhaps a bigger issue still is why communal open-plan showers haven't been removed completely in favor of individual private cubicles.

 

The way Rowling is described as "transphobic" is bizarre. I read the article she wrote and it seemed to me that what she was trying to say was that she supported the right of the transgendered to change gender and also wanted to protect the rights of the cisgendered to not have the system abused. It's clearly absurd to allow a man to declare himself female and just walk on in to a changing room where biological women don't want to be watched undressing by a person who is visibly male. It's pointless to have declared "safe spaces" for women if any man can announce he is female and just walk on in.

The whole issue of whether someone is capable of doing a job gets lost in the howling about discrimination. I remember many years ago, when the idea that all jobs had to be open to women equally was quite new, a friend of mine worked as an engineer. He found himself with a new female coworker whose standard request at the start of every day was for someone to lift her toolbox into the back of her van for her. She had the job - the company had to hire women - but wasn't physically capable of actually doing the job because she wasn't strong enough to lift the tools in and out of the van (I forget what the tools were exactly, other than that they were heavy)

If we could get away from the identity politics and look at whether someone is capable of doing the job things would be much clearer. The 90lb biological female who identifies as male would be eaten alive in the supermax prison, but the 250lb biological female former Olympic shot putt champion who now identifies as male would probably fare better. Likewise the 90lb biological male might not last very long in that environment.

What gets really weird is the idea of gender identity among prisoners. What happens if a violent rapist decides to identify as female - are his her newfound rights violated by being put in a men's prison, or does this person who has fully functional male anatomy and a history of violent rape get sent to a women's prison and assigned a female cellmate?

 

I'd love to see what would happen if Donald Trump announced that he identifies as female. Would the silly fringes of the left acknowledge him - sorry, her - as the first female president? If in the runup to this year's election he made such an announcement the Republicans would get to take a leaf from the Democrats' playbook of 2016 and claim that transphobia was the only reason not to vote for her.

 

I read an interesting article yesterday but then closed the tab before I thought to copy the URL. It was looking at different aspects of what discrimination based on sexual orientation, as opposed to sex, might look like. If I recall it was drawing on the arguments made in SCOTUS to illustrate.

It used some examples I found quite interesting. If Alice, Bill and Carl work for the same company and both Alice and Bill publicly express the fact they are attracted to Carl, what happens if Bill is fired for it but Alice is not? One might argue that Bill was fired for being gay and therefore he gains new protection under the new ruling but one could equally argue that Bill was already protected on the basis that such a firing would suggest that a woman may express attraction to a man but another man may not - in other words Bill is being discriminated against on the basis of his sex rather than his sexuality. Had he been female his comments would not have got him fired. If both Alice and Bill were fired for violating a company policy against relationships within the office then neither has been discriminated against because the rule applies equally to everybody.

If I manage to find the article again I'll post it, I found it an interesting read with arguments I hadn't previously considered.

 

I know of a number of initiatives re: 'representation, minorities, etc.' at a hypothetical workplace where hypothetically someone such as myself though not necessarily myself may have hypothetically been put to the side because of his or her or their or whatever hypothetical secondary sex characteristics, i.e., those that hypothetically disqualify him (purely for the sake of knowing grammar) from being part of a group that's underrepresented, minority, etc. But say that this hypothetical person were to hypothetically raise a complaint on the basis of an until-then-unstated hypothetical identity of group belonging. Do we now have a case where what seemed progressive and moral was actually regressive and immoral? Does "You didn't say" turn a right into effectively a wrong? It seems rather silly.

 

A lot of things about anything relating to minorities seems silly and getting sillier.

If there are specific accommodations that specific groups might need, and it's relevant to discuss those accommodations collectively, some forms of "representation" seems like it might be relevant. What seems to be happening more and more is that ever-more diverse groups are being lumped together under the generic umbrella of "minority" as if "minority" were a useful way to identify people. It's hard to see through the eyes of someone who is part of a minority group but I can't help but wondering whether endless efforts to "represent" actually exacerbate the problem by constantly highlighting how the group is Not Like Us.

Where matters relating to sexuality and gender identity are concerned it seems the ever-growing list of letters just tries to make increasingly diverse groups appear the same when all they have in common is that they don't fit into traditional worldviews of gender and sexuality. When considering what different groups have in common and how they differ, what does a person born male who has medically transitioned to a woman have in common with a gay man? What does a lesbian have in common with someone who identifies as genderfluid? If anything a heterosexual man probably has more in common, even considering nothing more than sexuality and gender identity, with a lesbian than an asexual person does on the basis that both the heterosexual man and the lesbian identify with the gender at birth and are sexually attracted to women.

It seems akin to saying the "standard" worldview is atheist/agnostic and then referring to a group known as HKZCMBJ+ to refer to Hindus, Krishnas, Zoroastrians, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Jews as an amorphous group, with the + to include anyone else who might feel left out.

ETA: If a company truly wants to sideline someone based on a protected characteristic it doesn't seem like a huge leap of faith to imagine them tweaking the stated requirements such that the "undesirable" person didn't match them. if you've got the best employee you could possibly imagine but don't want to promote them because you dislike them for whatever reason (based on protected characteristics or otherwise), is it such a huge leap to add something to the requirements for this specific promotion that they don't match but your preferred candidate does? I can just imagine disliking candidate A, so making sure candidate B gets assigned a less desirable project that happens to help develop a specific skillset and then making that skillset a requirement for the promotion.

 

In a right to work state, like mine, if an employer can't figure out how to get rid of the "unwanted" without reference to Title VII, the employer is dumber than rocks and deserves to be sued.

For pity's sake

You can fire someone for any or no reason here, including for being a Yankees fan or wearing a green shirt.

 

If you can get rid of someone for wearing a green shirt it seems spectacularly bizarre to create a list of reasons you can't fire someone.

Would it stand up in court if it transpired that an employer fired a whole load of people for their dress sense and every single one of them happened to be a member of a protected class? If the stated reason for firing people was because the boss disliked how they dressed but it turned out that everyone who got fired was gay, would the combination of multiple firings add up to something that would form the basis for legal action?

I guess if the employer was pulling that sort of game they would fire one for being late, one for dress code violations and so on, but presumably if the boss had such serious problems with gay people he'd avoid hiring them in the first place. One has to wonder what sort of boss would be OK with hiring someone and working with them, only to fire them upon learning some aspect of their life that makes zero difference to their work, especially if they were a very good employee.

 

I know a bunch of Christians that would fire someone in a heartbeat if they found out they were gay.
Would stop being their friend, having dinner with them, riding in a car with them, working out at the gym.

 

Always makes me wonder if I should say something, but I never have, because then I'd have to say something.

 

I’m starting to think that the older i get, my answer to everything is “look at Jesus.”

 

Has been my 'is this how Jesus would have treated X people?' outlook for a while

 

Yep.
You, know, "Those People(TM)"). Like lepers, prostitutes, JewishTraitorTaxCollectors, Samaritan half-breeds, Gentile oppressors, and women...