Why Gorsuch upheld civil rights for LGBTQ Americans

When one of the high court’s staunchest defenders of LGBTQ rights, Justice Anthony Kennedy, retired in 2018, most court watchers expected those rights to only get rolled back. Enter a strict textualist.

In a landmark, and unexpected, decision yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that firing an employee because of their sexual orientation or gender identity violates federal law.

In what could be a month of blockbuster decisions from the high court, the ruling immediately ranks among the most consequential civil rights rulings in the court’s history, experts say. The fact it came from a court with a small but deeply conservative majority – and that so many people tried to access the opinion online it crashed the court’s website – only heightened the drama.

To hear Justice Neil Gorsuch – who wrote the 6-3 majority opinion – tell it, the landmark ruling was a straightforward one. The 172 pages of opinions tell a more complicated story – one of three-pronged debate between the court’s conservative justices over the best practices of textualism, a judicial method of interpreting laws based on the “ordinary meaning” of the text.

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex and national origin.” In that statute, the majority held that “sex” covers people who are “gay or transgender.”

“Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result,” wrote Justice Gorsuch. “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,” he added. “Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefit.”