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  • 2018-07-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Did the Trump Administration Say Employers Can Fire Workers for Being Gay? (en)
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  • The U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) September 2017 involvement in a labor dispute case before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made the online rounds again nearly a year later, in the form a claim that the Trump administration says employers can fire people for being gay. As Newsweek and other news outlets reported at the time, the case, Zarda v. Altitude Express, concerned a New York state man who was suing his former employer claiming that the company had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 2010 when it fired him after he revealed to a customer that he was gay : Though Zarda died in 2014, his sister and partner, as well as his estate, have continued to pursue the case. The DOJ entered the case when that agency filed an amicus brief in July 2017, arguing that the anti-discrimination law — which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin — does not cover sexual orientation. The move led to a rare instance of two federal agencies' arguing against one another in court, as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) also filed a brief supporting Zarda's case: During oral arguments in September 2017, Mooppan asserted that employers under Title VII are permitted to consider employees' out-of-work sexual conduct, telling judges that there is a common sense, intuitive difference between sex and sexual orientation. Zarda's side disagreed: The DOJ did not explicitly argue that employers should be able to fire workers because of their sexual orientation, but rather that employees are not protected in that regard under the same laws (Title VII) that would defend them on the basis of race or gender. On 26 February 2018, however, the court ruled in a 10-3 decision that Title VII does cover sexual orientation, with Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann writing in the majority decision that: In May 2018, Altitude Express chose to appeal the Second Circuit's ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court: As noted above, Altitude Express' appeal is not based on the specific merits of Zarda's case (i.e., whether he was in fact discriminated against), but about whether Title VII protections apply in such circumstances. (en)
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