18/06/2020
It has been hailed as “one of the most important” legal decisions affecting LGBTQ Americans in decades and already has a large and growing entry on Wikipedia. Put simply, the ruling means that Federal US law now protects LGBTQ people from dismissal in employment, across the length and breadth of the country, superceding and overruling where necessary, local ordinances. The case was brought through the efforts of a gay man called Gerald Bostock. Mr Bostock was employed by a local county in the state of Georgia, which lacked any protection for LGBTQ workers. Mr Bostock made an inoccuous promotion at work for a gay softball league team of which he was a member – and the religiously conservative administration fired him for it on the somewhat unfathomable grounds that it constituted “conduct unbecoming”. The American version of the Trade Union Congress, known as the AFLCIO, takes up the story, and explains that the case was combined for the Supreme Court with that of Donald Zarda and transwoman Aimee Stephens. This week, the Supreme Court sided with the LGBTQ community and our allies in unions and workers rights organisations everywhere, delivering a verdict that discrimination on grounds of sexual or gender identity is in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Pride at Work, a network of LGBTQ trade unionists and allies said “ The approximately 11.5 million LGB people and 1.5 million transgender people in the United States are now protected from discrimination in workplaces across the country. While many lower courts already have recognized that, we now have clarity from the highest court in the land. “ The Feminist Majority Foundation added its support for the ruling, adding that the Trump administration's campaigns against transgender people in particular might now be curtailed somewhat, and adding “The ruling was a surprise coming from the increasingly conservative court, but Republican-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberal Democratic appointees to form a 6-3 majority”. The fact that conservative Justices sided with Democrats in such a huge victory was explored by BBC 2's flagship news magazine “Newsnight” who talked to the author Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell referred to the ruling as understandable in that the conservative Justices belong on the libertarian wing of the Republican movement in the United States. Unlike religious conservatives and moralists, they see no contradiction between gay freedom and a small government model of society, and indeed believe gay rights are desireable as an important facet of individual liberty.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/24/is-libertarianism-...