The US Supreme Court on Monday said it would take up the question of whether gay and transgender workers are protected by federal law that bars discrimination in the workplace.
The nation’s highest court is considering three related cases, one involving a funeral home worker who was fired after telling her employer she was a transgender woman and would be wearing women’s clothing at work.
In the other two cases, gay workers said they were fired by their employers because of their sexual orientation.
The court is to decide whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, also applies to sexual orientation and gender identity.
In the absence of a ruling from the top court, lower courts have issued contradictory decisions.
The case is likely to be heard in the fall with a ruling issued next year.
The transgender case involves Aimee Stephens, who was fired by R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes in Michigan after working there for six years as Anthony Stephens.
Stephens sued and earned the support of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under then-US president Barack Obama.
However, the administration of US President Donald Trump has taken the opposite tack, and the president has named two conservative justices to the Supreme Court since taking office.
In the Stephens case, a lower court initially sided with the funeral home, but that ruling was reversed by a federal appeals court, which said that her firing was a form of sex discrimination.
“What happened to me was wrong, it was hurtful and it harmed my family,” Stephens said in a statement issued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is representing her in court.
“Most of America would be shocked if the Supreme Court said it was legal to fire Aimee because she’s transgender,” ACLU LGBT & HIV Project director James Esseks said. “Such a ruling would be disastrous, relegating LGBTQ people around the country to a second-class citizen status.”
The two other cases are in New York and Georgia.
In the New York case, a sky-diving instructor, Donald Zarda, sued his employer claiming he was fired because he is gay.
Zarda, who died in an accident in 2014, won his case, which is being pursued by his partner and his sister.
In the Georgia case, child welfare services coordinator Gerald Lynn Bostock said that he was dismissed because he is gay.
A court in Atlanta ruled against him, arguing that sexual orientation is not protected under civil rights law.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the