Tag Archives: 1964 Civil Rights Act

Michigan LGBT Rights Ballot Initiative Falls Short Of Signatures Needed

Democrats Reintroduce The LGBT Equality Act…… AGAIN.

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A screenshot of a press release introducing the Equality Act from Rep. Cicilline and Sen. Merkley. The introduction says: U.S. Congressman David N. Cicilline (RI-01) and U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (OR) today announced the introduction of the Equality Act, comprehensive civil rights legislation that prohibits discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community in the areas of employment, education, credit, jury service, federal funding, housing, and public accommodations.

Via Lambda Legal:

Today, U.S. Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) announced the introduction of the Equality Act, bipartisan federal legislation that will update existing federal nondiscrimination laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act, to confirm that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity is unlawful discrimination based on sex. The Equality Act clarifies sex discrimination laws to prohibit LGBTQ discrimination in employment, housing, credit, education, and other areas, and explicitly extends sex discrimination protections to public accommodations and federally funded programs.

Lambda Legal applauds the re-introduction of the Equality Act, long past-due federal legislation which provides clear, comprehensive, and explicit protections for LGBTQ people in federal law. Coupled with President Biden’s early action applying the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County to all federal laws currently prohibiting sex discrimination, we can see true equality on the horizon. And it can’t happen soon enough: the LGBTQ community has been asking Congress for protections since Reps. Bella Abzug and Ed Koch first introduced the Equality Act of 1974, 47 years ago, and nearly fifty years of waiting is long enough. (Click the highlighted link to read the history of The Equality Act.)

Unfortunately the Republican Party’s evil puppet masters – the evangelicals – will not allow the Equality Act to pass the Senate. It’ll be filibustered there.

Eliminate the filibuster and this has a chance of finally after almost 5 decades becoming law.

SO GAY! – LGBT Weekly News Roundup 1/30/2022

Supreme Court Rules That LGBT Americans Are Covered Under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Cannot Be Fired For Being Gay

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NBC News reports:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that existing federal law forbids job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, a major victory for advocates of gay rights — and a surprising one from an increasingly conservative court.

The decision said Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which makes it illegal for employers to discriminate because of a person’s sex, among other factors, also covers sexual orientation. It upheld rulings from lower courts that said sexual orientation discrimination was a form of sex discrimination.

Across the nation, 21 states have their own laws prohibiting job discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Seven more provide that protection only to public employees. Those laws remain in force, but Monday’s ruling means federal law now provides similar protection for LGBT employees in the rest of the country.

The 6-3 opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s four liberal justices.

“An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,” Gorsuch wrote.

You can read the historic ruling by clicking HERE

Donald Trump To Hold Presser at Mar-a-Lago After His Arrest and Perp Walk

Donald Trump Tells Supreme Court Legalize Firing LGBT Americans

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Via  Buzzfeed News:

The Trump administration took its hardest line yet to legalize anti-gay discrimination on Friday when it asked the Supreme Court to declare that federal law allows private companies to fire workers based only on their sexual orientation. An amicus brief filed by the DOJ weighs in on two cases involving gay workers and what is meant by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination “because of sex.”

The administration argues courts nationwide should stop reading the civil rights law to protect gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers from bias because it was not originally intended to do so. That view conflicts with some lower court rulings that found targeting someone for their sexual orientation is an illegal form of both sex discrimination and sex stereotyping under Title VII.

The Log Cabin Republicans did not respond to emails from this website for comment.

The Mormon Church Releases Statement Opposing The LGBT Equality Act

The Mormon Church Releases Statement Opposing The LGBT Equality Act

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The leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka The Mormons) released a statement Monday morning opposing the Equality Act which would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to protect LGBT Americans over concerns regarding their “religious liberty”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is deeply concerned that the ongoing conflicts between religious liberty and LGBT rights is poisoning our civil discourse, eroding the free exercise of religion and preventing diverse Americans of good will from living together in respect and peace. Lawmakers across the nation, including members of Congress, are working to enact or strengthen laws that ensure LGBT persons fair access to important rights, such as nondiscrimination in areas like housing, employment and appropriate public accommodations. The Church is on record favoring reasonable measures that secure such rights.

At the same time, we urgently need laws that protect the rights of individuals and faith communities to freely gather, speak out publicly, serve faithfully and live openly according to their religious beliefs without discrimination or retaliation, even when those beliefs may be unpopular. This includes the right of religious organizations and religious schools to establish faith-based employment and admissions standards and to preserve the religious nature of their activities and properties.

This does not represent a change or shift in Church doctrine regarding marriage or chastity. It does represent a desire to bring people together, to protect the rights of all, and to encourage mutually respectful dialogue and outcomes in this highly polarized national debate.

Conflicts between rights are common and nothing new. When conflicts arise between religious freedom and LGBT rights, the Church advocates a balanced “fairness for all” approach that protects the most important rights for everyone while seeking reasonable, respectful compromises in areas of conflict. The Church affirms this as the best way to overcome sharp divisions over these issues. The Church supported the 2015 “fairness for all” legislation in the Utah Legislature that successfully protected both religious freedom and LGBT rights in employment and housing and that has helped facilitate greater understanding and respect.

The Equality Act now before Congress is not balanced and does not meet the standard of fairness for all. While providing extremely broad protections for LGBT rights, the Equality Act provides no protections for religious freedom. It would instead repeal long-standing religious rights under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, threaten religious employment standards, devastate religious education, defund numerous religious charities and impose secular standards on religious activities and properties. The Church joins other religious organizations that also strongly oppose the Equality Act as unbalanced, fundamentally unfair and a path to further conflict.

The Church calls upon members of Congress to pass legislation that vigorously protects religious freedom while also protecting basic civil rights for LGBT persons. It is time for wise policymakers to end this destructive conflict and protect the rights of all Americans.

What the LDS Church fails to or “forgets” to mention is that religious discrimination is already protected under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against individuals because of their religion (or lack of religious belief) in hiring, firing, or any other terms and conditions of employment. The law also prohibits job segregation based on religion, such as assigning an employee to a non-customer contact position because of actual or feared customer preference. But they have no problem by wanting religious organizations and religious schools to discriminate by establishing faith-based employment and admissions standards.

Hypocrites.

Michigan LGBT Rights Ballot Initiative Falls Short Of Signatures Needed

Supreme Court Set to Decide If The 1964 Civil Rights Act Applies to LGBT Workers

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The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would decide whether the Civil Rights Act of 1964 guarantees protections from workplace discrimination to gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans Americans.

The three cases have been accepted by the court to be heard.  One of them is Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda, No. 17-1623:

The New York case was brought by a skydiving instructor, Donald Zarda, who said he was fired because he was gay. His dismissal followed a complaint from a female customer who had voiced concerns about being tightly strapped to Mr. Zarda during a tandem dive. Mr. Zarda, hoping to reassure the customer, told her that he was “100 percent gay.”

Mr. Zarda sued under Title VII and lost the initial rounds. He died in a 2014 skydiving accident, and his estate pursued his case.

Last year, a divided 13-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit allowed the lawsuit to proceed. Writing for the majority, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann concluded that “sexual orientation discrimination is motivated, at least in part, by sex and is thus a subset of sex discrimination.”

The arguments in the Second Circuit had a curious feature: Lawyers for the federal government appeared on both sides. One lawyer, representing the E.E.O.C., said Title VII barred discrimination against gay people. Another, representing the Trump administration, took the contrary view.

The second case: Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., No. 17-1618. was brought by a child welfare services coordinator who said he was fired for being gay. The 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, ruled against him in a short, unsigned opinion that cited a 1979 decision that had ruled that “discharge for homosexuality is not prohibited by Title VII.”

The third case: R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, No. 18-107, concerns Aimee Stephens, who was fired from a Michigan funeral home after she announced in 2013 that she was a transgender woman and would start working in women’s clothing.  Ms. Stephens had worked at the funeral home for six years.  Two weeks after her announcement the funeral home’s owner, Thomas Rost, fired Ms. Stephens. Asked for the “specific reason that you terminated Stephens,” Mr. Rost said: “Well, because he was no longer going to represent himself as a man.

The cases mark a pivotal moment in the fight for gay civil rights, but the current composition of the court with its two new Trump appointees ― Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch ― has many LGBT advocates and Americans worried.

Currently, 30 states lack laws that explicitly prohibit discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations on the basis of both sexual orientation or gender identity

The three cases will be heard sometime in the fall of 2019.

Nancy Pelosi Calls Passage Of LGBT Equality Act A 'Priority'

Nancy Pelosi: Democrats Will Introduce LGBT Equality Act Next Week

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Via the Washington Blade:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced Thursday during her weekly news conference the Equality Act, legislation that would enact long sought-after federal protections against anti-LGBT legislation, would be introduced next week.

As it was previously introduced, the Equality Act would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act to ban anti-LGBT discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, jury service, education, federal programs and credit.

The bill also seeks to update federal law to include sex in the list of protected classes in public accommodation in addition to expanding the definition of public accommodations to include retail stores, banks, transportation services and health care services.

Nancy Pelosi told the Washington Blade “we’ll see” when asked when she’d bring legislation to a floor vote, but was confident the House would approve it.

“As we go along, it’s the tempo of the floor, but it is a priority for us,” Pelosi said. “I’m very pleased because we have a great deal of outside support for it, which I hope will help us pass it in the Senate. We most certainly will pass it overwhelmingly in the House.”

The Republican controlled Senate is a different story

Indiana Tax Business Denies Service To Lesbian Couple Cites Religious Beliefs

Indiana Tax Business Denies Service To Lesbian Couple, Cites Religious Beliefs

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Carver Tax Service in Russiaville, Indiana had done Bailey Brazzel’s taxes for the past 4 years, but that ended this year when Brazzel showed up with her wife, Samantha.. The two were married in Peru in July and were filing their taxes jointly for the first time.  

This year though Nancy Fivecoate, who runs Carver Tax refused to do their taxes citing her religious beliefs, and recommended another tax service business which would work with them.

“At first we thought she was kidding, But when she started talking about the Bible, we knew she was serious – and I was completely shocked.” Brazzel said. “You hear about it all the time, but nothing like this has happened to us before. She had done my taxes with no issues before, but now that we were married and she didn’t agree with my life choices, she wouldn’t.”

Fivecoate has said she is simply sticking to her religious convictions.

“This year, [Brazzel] came with her wife and I declined to prepare the taxes because of my religious beliefs,” Fivecoate said in a released statement. “I am a Christian and I believe marriage is between one man and one woman. I was very respectful to them. I told them where I thought she might be able to get her taxes prepared.”

Fivecoate (of course) said she has other gay clients, and has no issues preparing their taxes. She said it becomes an issue when the couple is married.

Denying a gay couple service is perfectly legal in parts of Indiana that haven’t passed ordinances specifically protecting people who are LGBT. That includes Russiaville and Howard County where Carver Tax Service is located.

Indiana law makes it illegal to deny services to people based on their race, color, national origin, ancestry, religion, sex, familial status (having children under 18) and disability – but not sexual orientation.

Fifty years after the Stonewall riots and fifty-five years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there is still no explicit federal protections against discrimination for LGBT Americans.

FRC's Tony Perkins Whines: Democrats Want to Take Away Tax-Exempt Status From Loving Christian Hate Groups

FRC’s Tony Perkins Has The Vapors Over Federal Ruling That The Civil Rights Act Protects LGB’s

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FRC's Tony Perkins Has The Vapors Over Federal Ruling That The Civil Rights Act Protects LGB's

Family Research Council hate group President Tony Perkins has her panties all in a bunch over yesterday’s federal court ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also applies to anti-LGB employment discrimination.

She vents via propaganda press release:

If Congress won’t rewrite the law, liberals will find a court who will! That’s been the M.O. of the Left for decades: packing the bench with wannabe legislators who’ll impose the agendas they could never pass democratically. It worked on school prayer, abortion, and marriage, as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) bragged last year. Now, the Left is using the same playbook on the gender debate — knowing full well that it’s the only way they can force their vision on an unwilling America.

Fortunately, there are some judges who agree with us that if the Left wants to change the definition of discrimination, it’s asking the wrong branch of government. Unfortunately, those judges aren’t in the majority on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. In a mind-boggling decision yesterday, the judges not only stole Congress’s job — they admitted they were doing it!

For years, liberals have tried to pass legislation making “sexual orientation” a protected category under the Civil Rights Act — first with ENDA (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act) and then with the “Equality Act.” The House and Senate rejected them every time.

They recognized, as we do, that sexual orientation wasn’t on the minds of legislators 53 years ago when it was trying to weed out prejudice — and more importantly, it wasn’t in the text of the law that passed! No bother, liberals said. We’ll just rewrite the policy through our activist courts.

And Tuesday, the 7th Circuit was more than willing to comply. “For many years,” Chief Judge Diane Wood admitted, “the courts of appeals of this country understood the prohibition against sex discrimination to exclude discrimination on the basis of a person’s sexual orientation.”

So by her own admission, there’s absolutely no justification for rewriting the law. Still, she goes on, it’s the court’s responsibility to take a “fresh look” at its position. And in doing so, she writes, “we conclude today that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is a form of sex discrimination.”

The decision, an 8-3 bombshell, was astounding because it bucked — not just the 7th Circuit’s precedent, but every circuit’s precedent. Judge Diane Sykes was just as shocked as we are. “Any case heard by the full court is important,” she wrote in her dissent, “This one is momentous. All the more reason to pay careful attention to the limits on the court’s role. We are not authorized to infuse the text with a new or unconventional meaning or to update it to respond to changed social, economic, or political conditions.” In a powerful rebuke, she warns her colleagues that they’ve crossed into dangerous new territory.

Mr. Rogers responds:

 

Amazon Tells GOP Senators It Won’t Sell Books That “Frame LGBTQ+ Identity As Mental Illness”

Seventh Circuit Federal Court Strikes Huge Blow For Equality, LGB’s Covered Under 1964 Civil Rights Act

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Seventh Circuit Federal Court Strikes Huge Blow For Equality, LGB's Covered Under 1964 Civil Rights Act

In an 8-3 ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on Tuesday struck a massive blow for LGBT equality when it  concluded that federal civil rights law — specifically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — protects workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation. So, the court decided, it’s not legal in the US for an employer to discriminate against gay workers — making it the first federal appeals court to conclude that gay people are protected under existing civil rights law.

The argument: Federal civil rights laws prohibit sex discrimination, and this, based on the Seventh Circuit Court’s interpretation of the law, encompasses sexual orientation. “It would require considerable calisthenics to remove the ‘sex’ from ‘sexual orientation.’ The effort to do so has led to confusing and contradictory results,” Chief Judge Diane Wood concluded in the majority opinion.

The case related to Kimberly Hively, an openly lesbian woman who had applied for multiple positions at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana, only to never be hired full time. She believed the rejections were related to her sexual orientation, so she filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a lawsuit — arguing this anti-gay discrimination was illegal under federal law. The Seventh Circuit Court sided with her, reversing previous decisions on the topic.

The ruling as of this time only applies to the Seventh Circuit, which is made up of Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin and can be overturned when/if the matter makes it to the Supreme Court.

 

Federal Court Rules That The Civil Rights Act DOES NOT Protect Against Anti-Gay Discrimination

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The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that a lesbian employee was not protected from anti-gay workplace discrimination under the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination prohibition, thus ignoring a Supreme Court precedent.

Jameka Evans said that she was harassed, and effectively fired from her job at Georgia Regional Hospital, for being a lesbian. But the three-judge panel on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals which included notoriously anti-gay Judge William Pryor who was on President Donald Trump’s short list for the Supreme Court, ruled 2-1 that Title VII does not cover anti-LGBT discrimination. And while the panel allowed the complainant to amend her case to alleged discrimination based on sex stereotyping, it ultimately found that “she did not provide enough factual matter to plausibly suggest that her decision to present herself in a masculine manner led to the alleged adverse employment actions.”

Pryor surprisingly previously joined in a 2011 opinion finding that Title VII applies to transgender people. But he also wrote in support of upholding a ban on gay sex in 2003.

“But just as a woman cannot recover under Title VII when she is fired because of her heterosexuality, neither can a gay woman sue for discrimination based on her sexual orientation,” Pryor wrote. “Deviation from a particular gender stereotype may correlate disproportionately with a particular sexual orientation, and plaintiffs who allege discrimination on the basis of gender nonconformity will often also have experienced discrimination because of sexual orientation. But under Title VII, we ask only whether the individual experienced discrimination for deviating from a gender stereotype.”

Lambda Legal who argued on Evans her behalf that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in a statement that it will seek redress before the Supreme Court.

“This is not the end of the road for us and certainly not for Jameka,” said Greg Nevins, Lambda’s employment fairness project director. “Keeping your job shouldn’t depend on whether or not you pass for straight. There is no way to draw a line between sexual orientation discrimination and discrimination based on gender nonconformity because not being straight is gender-nonconforming, period.”

Source: LGBTQNation