Tag Archive for "gay rights" - Art Leonard Observations

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Federal Court Rules That Charlotte (N.C.) Catholic High School Violated Title VII by Discharging Gay Substitute Teacher

Posted on: September 6th, 2021 by Art Leonard No Comments

In 2014, after federal courts ruled that North Carolina had to allow same-sex couples to marry, Lonnie Billard and his long-time partner Richard Donham decided to marry and Billard posted an exuberant announcement on his Facebook page for his friends only. He ended that announcement by stating, “If you don’t agree with this. . . keep it to yourself. You never asked my opinion about your personal life and I am not asking yours.”

Among Billard’s Facebook friends were staff and parents associated with Charlotte Catholic High School, where he had taught as a substitute English teacher since 2012, after a decade as a full-time member of the faculty teaching English and Drama. His friends did not keep the news to themselves, and the school stopped calling Billard as a substitute. When he asked why, he was told by the assistant principal that it was because he “announced his intention to marry a person of the same sex.”

Billard had been a very successful teacher at Charlotte Catholic. He won the Inspirational Educator Award from North Carolina State University in 2011 and the Charlotte Catholic Teacher of the Year Award in 2012. He had been nominated for that award “every year since its inception,” according to the man who was principal of the school at that time. He had been associated with the school since 2000, and throughout that time he had been in a “romantic relationship” with Donham, whom he listed on Charlotte Catholic employee contact forms as his “friend” or “housemate,” and who was identified on some forms as living at the same address as Billard. Donham came to Charlotte Catholic events with Billard, accompanying him on class trips to New York City with the drama students to see musicals, and had even served as a substitute teacher when Billard was teaching English full-time. Donham also substituted at the Charlotte Diocese’s middle school. Billard claimed that members of the high school’s administration knew that he was gay, but the current principal and assistant principal both claimed, rather incredibly, that they were not aware of his sexual orientation until his Facebook post in December 2014.

The Catholic Church is outspokenly opposed to same-sex marriage, and Catholic schools, which have employed many lesbians and gay men as teachers, have consistently dismissed those employees, regardless of how they have performed their jobs, upon finding out that they intended to or had married same-sex partners. The de facto position of the Church sounds like the federal government’s old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gay military service. They were happy to employ qualified gay people as ministers (especially church musicians) and teachers, so long as the employees were quiet about being gay and did not go public on same-sex marriages, which the Church saw as defying Catholic doctrine and setting a bad example for congregants and students.

Billard filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May 2015, claiming a violation of his rights under Title VII, but at that time the EEOC had not yet issued its ruling that it would investigate and prosecute sexual orientation claims under Title VII’s ban on discrimination because of sex. Ironically, the EEOC issued such a decision, in the case of gay air traffic controller David Baldwin, in July 2015, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in June 2015 in the Obergefell case that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry. Billard’s charge was still pending with the EEOC at that time, but perhaps the school’s religious defenses discouraged the EEOC from pursuing Billard’s case directly, as it decided not to sue Charlotte Catholic High School on his behalf, instead issuing a “Notice of Right to Sue Letter” to him in November 2016. He obtained representation from the ACLU Foundation and its North Carolina affiliate, which filed suit against the school in January 2017. On September 3, 2021, U.S. District Judge Max O. Cogburn, Jr., of the federal district court in Charlotte, granted summary judgment to Billard and denied summary judgment to the school, finding that Billard had proven a clear violation of Title VII and that none of the defenses argued by the school were valid.

The school argued that it had not fired Billard because is gay, but rather because he supports gay marriage, which the Catholic Church opposes. The school argued that under the First Amendment’s protection for free exercise of religion, it is privileged to discharge teachers who disagree with the Church’s positions. The school also argued that it was protected from liability by two sections of Title XII that relieve religious institutions, including religious schools, from complying with the statute’s ban on discrimination because of religion. The school also cited a “church autonomy doctrine” under the First Amendment, which prohibits “excessive government intrusion upon religion” and which includes the so-called “ministerial exception” that the Supreme Court has identified as sheltering religious institutions from any liability for their employment decisions regarding ministers. The school also cited the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, arguing that this federal statute would prevent the court from holding it liable for discrimination under Title VII.

The school actually disclaimed any contention that Billard comes within the ministerial exception, but to be on the safe side, Judge Cogburn explained why Billard’s duties as a substitute teacher did not come within the scope of that exception, as most recently described by the Supreme Court last year in a Catholic schoolteacher case, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru. Despite the Supreme Court’s broad definition of the exception to extend to any religious school teacher who performed any religious functions, the judge concluded that Billard’s charge to lead a prayer at the beginning of each class was too minimal to excuse the School from complying with Title VII in his case. He was not hired to teach religion.

Judge Cogburn rejected the school’s argument that discharging somebody for announcing his plans to marry a same sex partner was not discriminating against him because of his sex (or sexual orientation), drawing a comparison to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s reasoning in the Bostock decision of 2020. The judge pointed out that a female teacher who posted an announcement on Facebook that she was marrying a man would not be discharged, but when Billard, a man, posted the announcement that he was marrying a man, he was discharged, so clearly his sex was a reason for his discharge. Justice Gorsuch had described similar hypothetical situations in explaining the Supreme Court’s conclusion that firing an employee for being gay was inescapably due, in part, to the employee’s sex, and thus prohibited by Title VII, even though members of Congress in 1964 would not have expected such a ruling. Gorsuch, a “textualist,” takes the view that the words of the statute take priority over the expectation or intentions of the legislators who passed it, and his view won the support of six of the Court’s nine members.

As to the express religious institution exemptions included in Title VII, the court concluded that they were not intended to excuse religions institutions from complying with Title VII’s ban on discrimination because of sex. Rather, they were enacted to allow religious institutions to prefer members of their faith in making employment decisions. Billard is a Catholic, and the court was unwilling to accept the school’s argument that a provision allowing it to discriminate because of religion also gave it a right to discriminate because of sex if it had a religious reason for doing so. Under that theory, a religious institution would be free to discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin or sex, the other categories prohibited under Title VII, which stretches the religious exception too far and would expose thousands of employees of religious institutions to discriminatory treatment. Congress has not given religious institutions free reign to discriminate against employees for reasons other than the employees’ religion.

As to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, many federal appeals courts have ruled that it applies only to situations where the government is suing to enforce a federal statute against a religious defendant, but not to lawsuits brought by private individuals. Although the Supreme Court has yet to rule on this question, and at least one appeals court has disagreed with that conclusion, Judge Cogburn found based on a close reading of the text of RFRA that it was clearly aimed to restricting enforcement actions by the government, and that a court decision in a lawsuit brought by a non-governmental litigant, such as Lonnie Billard, would not be subject to RFRA’s requirement that the government prove it had a compelling interest to enforce a federal law that burdens the defendant’s free exercise of religion. The court itself is not a “party” to a non-governmental lawsuit, and in the absence of a governmental party, the affirmative defense provisions of RFRA have no application.

Several lawsuits are pending around the country in which employees of Catholic institutions who were discharged over the same-sex marriage issue are seeking relief under Title VII. In many of them, the plaintiffs’ job duties were such as to bring them within the ministerial exception. Billard’s is the rare case that was not, at least according to Judge Cogburn’s analysis.

Having granted Billard summary judgment on the merits of his claim, Judge Cogburn ordered that the case “Proceed to trial to determine the appropriate relief that should be granted.” It is likely that to avoid a court order to reinstate Billard as a substitute teacher, the school may offer a substantial financial settlement. Title VII specifically lists “reinstatement” as a remedy for a wrongful discharge. If the case doesn’t settle and Judge Cogburn orders reinstatement, the school and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte, a co-defendant, are likely to appeal to the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Cogburn was appointed to the court by President Barack Obama. In 2014, he wrote the decision striking down North Carolina’s ban on same-sex marriage, a decision that was upheld by the 4^th Circuit and denied review by the Supreme Court, and it was the decision that led Billard and Donham to decide to get married that led to this lawsuit!

Federal Court Temporarily Blocks New York State from Requiring a Religious Adoption Agency to Provide Services to Married Same-Sex Couples

Posted on: October 17th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

New Hope Family Services, which describes itself as a Christian adoption agency licensed by New York State to provide adoption services, has won a preliminary injunction to block New York’s Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) from closing the agency because of its refusal to provide services to married same-sex couples. New Hope Family Services, Inc. v. Poole, 2020 WL 5887296, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 183926 (N.D.N.Y., October 5, 2020).

New Hope sued Sheila J. Poole, OCFS’s Commissioner, after OCFS instructed New Hope to prepare to close down its adoption services if was unwilling to change its policy and work with married same-sex couples as required by a state regulation. U.S. District Judge Mae A. D’Agostino issued the injunction after being directed by the U.S. 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider her prior denial of a preliminary injunction at the same time that she dismissed New Hope’s lawsuit. The 2^nd Circuit panel reversed the dismissal decision. See 966 F. 3d 145 (2^nd Cir. 2020), reversing and remanding 387 F.Supp.3d 194 (N.D.N.Y. 2019).

Under New York law, only an “authorized agency” can evaluate potential adoptive parents, match them with children needing adoption, and make recommendations to a court that will ultimately grant the adoption. Evangelical Family Service was formed in 1965 by a Christian minister to undertake this work in Syracuse and was granted a two-year certificate of incorporation by the state. When the certificate came up for renewal, the state extended permanent certification. Eventually the agency was renamed New Hope Family Services. At that time, New York’s adoption statute limited the right to adopt children to “an adult unmarried person or an adult husband and his adult wife.”

In 2010, the legislature amended the law to allow authorized agencies to place children for adoption with “an adult unmarried person, an adult married couple together, or any two unmarried adult intimate partners together.” This amendment updated the statute to comply with what the courts had been doing, as the New York Court of Appeals had recognized second-parent adoptions for same-sex couples during the 1990s. The adoption statute empowers OCFS to adopt regulations for enforcing statutory rights, which led it to adopt a non-discrimination regulation and to inform all authorized agencies that they could not discriminate against same-sex couples or unmarried couples.

After New York’s Marriage Equality Law went into effect in July 2011, of course, married same-sex couples would be covered by the amended adoption statute, since the Marriage Equality Law adopted a policy of equal rights for same-sex marriage couples, and authorized agencies were so advised. In 2015, the Supreme Court found that same-sex couples have a federal constitutional right to marry, and their marriages are entitled to the same treatment under state law as all other marriages.

Regardless of these developments, New Hope retained its existing policy, which was to limit its services to unmarried adults who were not living together with other adults in an intimate relationship, and to heterosexually married adults. If New Hope was approached for services by individuals or couples who did not come within this policy, it would offer to refer them to other agencies for adoption services. It refers to this policy as “recusal and referral.”

In 2018, OCFS decided to audit the policies of all authorized agencies. It had never received a complaint about denial of services by New Hope, so this was the first time OFCS was confronted by New Hope’s non-compliant policy. After some conversations between the office and New Hope, in the course of which OCFS staff made some statements that New Hope (and the 2^nd Circuit panel) seized upon as showing “hostility” to New Hope’s religious beliefs, the written ultimatum was delivered late in the fall of 2018, setting a deadline for New Hope to adjust its policy by the end of November. Instead, New Hope filed this lawsuit, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-freedom litigation organization that frequently challenges gay rights policies in the courts.

New Hope argued that the regulation went beyond the statute by compelling authorized agencies to provide services to same-sex couples, whereas the statute was worded in permissive language – that agencies were allowed to provide service to such couples. At the time the statute was adopted, Governor David Paterson issued a statement that it would not require any agencies to change their polices. Thus, New Hope argued, OCFS was going beyond its authority in trying to force New Hope to change its policy. Furthermore, New Hope argued, requiring it to serve same-sex couples against its religious beliefs would violate its First Amendment rights of free speech and free exercise of religion, and, citing the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, it claimed that OCFS had expressed hostility to New Hope’s religious beliefs. New Hope sought a preliminary injunction to block OCFS from taking action against it while the lawsuit was pending.

The state moved to dismiss the lawsuit. Judge D’Agostino granted the state’s motion in May 2019, finding that the regulation was within the scope of the statute and did not violate New Hope’s constitutional rights. At the same time, she denied the motion for injunctive relief. New Hope appealed to the 2^nd Circuit, which reversed the dismissal in July 2020 and sent the case back to Judge D’Agostino. The three-judge Circuit panel concluded that New Hope’s allegations were sufficient to put into play its constitutional claims as well as its claims about the limited scope of the adoption statute as permissive rather than mandatory, and directed Judge D’Agostino to reconsider the issue of the preliminary injunction in that light. The three-judge panel, which also mentioned the “hostility” issue, retained jurisdiction of the case, advising that if D’Agostino issued a new decision that was appealed, the appeal would go to the same three-judge panel.

Given the realities of the situation, it was foreordained that D’Agostino would issue the injunction, although there were signs in her opinion that she had not changed her mind about her original analysis but was basically following the directions of the court of appeals, her explanations flowing from their decision. In one footnote, responding to the issue of “hostility,” she wrote: “In conducting its analysis, the Court cannot ignore the drastic difference in the circumstances which have historically led to findings of religious hostility and the circumstances of the present case. . . Here, the only statements upon which the Second Circuit relies indicate, at worst, that OCFS intends to ensure compliance with anti-discrimination law in the adoption process, regardless of an organization’s religious beliefs. The Court finds the argument that these statements indicate hostility tenuous.” But she acknowledged that she was bound by the 2^nd Circuit’s opinion to credit this argument for purposes of deciding whether to issue the preliminary injunction.

At the heart of the constitutional free exercise issue is the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1990 decision Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 873, which ruled that there is no constitutional right under the Free Exercise Clause for individuals and organizations to refuse to comply with religiously-neutral laws of general application that incidentally burden their free exercise rights. In that case, however, the Supreme Court recognized that a government policy that burdens other rights as well as religious free exercise rights (a so-called “hybrid rights case”) presents a different issue and may carry a higher burden of justification by the government. Judge D’Agostino had originally responded to this point by rejecting New Hope’s compelled speech argument, labeling as “government speech” any recommendation that they would make to a court to approve an adoption by a same-sex couple, on the premise that as an “authorized agency” they were performing an inherently governmental function on behalf of the state, applying state-specified criteria, and they were not speaking for themself. The 2^nd Circuit panel disagreed, finding that the state gave authorized agencies substantial discretion, so their speech was entitled to First Amendment protection. Furthermore, New Hope’s argument that the regulation went beyond the scope of the statute was also arguable, given the statute’s permissive rather than mandatory wording. In that case, New Hope should be entitled to litigate the case.

Concerning the public interest, which is considered on a motion for injunctive relief, closing down New Hope would reduce the number of agencies in its geographical area providing adoption services, it claims to never have been approach by same-sex couples seeking its services, and in the past New Hope had been repeatedly praised for the high quality of its services, so on balance it was arguable that the public interest supports keeping it open while the case continues.

The New Hope case is very similar to a case that will be argued in the Supreme Court on November 4, the day after election day, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, in which Catholic Social Services is suing the City of Philadelphia over the city’s refusal to renew its contract with CSS to participate in the city’s foster care system. CSS refuses to provide its services to same-sex couples seeking to be foster parents.

In granting CSS’s petition to review a decision in favor of the city by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3^rd Circuit, see 922 F.3d 140 (3^rd Cir. 2019), CSS specifically asked the Supreme Court both to reconsider its ruling in Employment Division v. Smith and to consider whether requiring a religious agency to violate is principles in order to participate in the child welfare system violates its 1^st Amendment rights. There are already at least four members of the Court who have signaled their desire to reconsider Employment Division. The probable addition of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Court may well tip the Court over to a majority to overrule or narrow the Employment Division precedent, which could affect litigation in other cases challenging Trump Administration policies to carve broad religious and moral objection protection out of non-discrimination rules.

It is unlikely that Judge D’Agostino would issue a final ruling in the New Hope case until after the Supreme Court rules in the CSS case. Such a ruling is unlikely to come before the beginning of 2021 and theoretically could come as late as June. In the meanwhile, the preliminary injunction blocks OCFS from taking any action to shut down New Hope’s adoption activities.

Supreme Court to Decide Whether Discrimination Because of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity Violates Title VII’s Ban on Discrimination Because of Sex

Posted on: April 22nd, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

The U.S. Supreme Court announced on April 22 that it will consider appeals next term in three cases presenting the question whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination because of an individual’s sex, covers claims of discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity. Because federal courts tend to follow Title VII precedents when interpreting other federal sex discrimination statutes, such as the Fair Housing Act and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a ruling in these cases could have wider significance than just employment discrimination claims.

The first Petition for certiorari was filed on behalf of Gerald Lynn Bostock, a gay man who claimed he was fired by the Clayton County, Georgia, Juvenile Court System, for which he worked as Child Welfare Services Coordinator, because of his sexual orientation. Bostock v. Clayton County Board of Commissioners, No. 17-1618 (filed May 25, 2018). The trial court dismissed his claim, and the Atlanta-based 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal, 723 Fed. Appx. 964 (11^th Cir., May 10, 2018), petition for en banc review denied, 894 F.3d 1335 (11^th Cir., July 18, 2018), reiterating an old circuit precedent from 1979 that Title VII does not forbid discrimination against homosexuals.

The second Petition was filed by Altitude Express, a now-defunct sky-diving company that discharged Donald Zarda, a gay man, who claimed the discharge was at least in part due to his sexual orientation. Altitude Express v. Zarda, No. 17-1623 (filed May 29, 2018). The trial court, applying 2^nd Circuit precedents, rejected his Title VII claim, and a jury ruled against him on his New York State Human Rights Law claim. He appealed to the New York-based 2^nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which ultimately ruled en banc that the trial judge should not have dismissed the Title VII claim, because that law applies to sexual orientation discrimination. Zarda v. Altitude Express, 883 F.3d 100 (2^nd Cir., Feb. 26, 2018). This overruled numerous earlier 2^nd Circuit decisions.

The third petition was filed by R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, three establishments located in Detroit and its suburbs, which discharged a funeral director, William Anthony Beasley Stephens, when Stephens informed the proprietor, Thomas Rost, about her planned transition. R.G. & G.R. Funeral Homes v EEOC, No. 18-107 (filed July 20, 2018). Rost stated religious objections to gender transition, claiming protection from liability under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the funeral home under Title VII. Stephens, who changed her name to Aimee as part of her transition, intervened as a co-plaintiff in the case. The trial judge found that Title VII had been violated, but that RFRA protected Harris Funeral Homes from liability. The Cincinnati-based 6^th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s holding that the funeral home violated Title VII, but reversed the RFRA ruling, finding that complying with Title VII would not substantially burden the funeral home’s free exercise of religion. EEOC v. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, 884 F.3d 560 (6^th Cir., March 7, 2018). The 6^th Circuit’s ruling reaffirmed its 2004 precedent in Smith v. City of Salem, 378 F.3d 566, using a gender stereotyping theory, but also pushed forward to hold directly that gender identity discrimination is a form of sex discrimination under Title VII.

In all three cases, the Court has agreed to consider whether Title VII’s ban on discrimination “because of sex” is limited to discrimination against a person because the person is a man or a woman, or whether, as the EEOC has ruled in several federal employment disputes, it extends to sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination claims.

The question whether the Court would consider these cases has been lingering on its docket almost a year, as the petitions in the Bostock and Zarda cases were filed within days of each other last May, and the funeral home’s petition was filed in July. The Court originally listed the Bostock and Zarda petitions for consideration during its pre-Term “long conference” at the end of September, but then took them off the conference list at the urging of Alliance Defending Freedom, representing the funeral home, which suggested that the Court should wait until briefing on the funeral home was completed and then take up all three cases together.

The Court returned the petitions to its conference list in December, and the cases were listed continuously since the beginning of this year, sparking speculation about why the Court was delaying, including the possibility that it wanted to put off consideration of this package of controversial cases until its next term, beginning in October 2019. That makes it likely that the cases will not be argued until next winter, with decisions emerging during the heat of the presidential election campaign next spring, as late as the end of June.

Title VII was adopted as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and went into effect in July 1965. “Sex” was added as a forbidden ground of discrimination in employment in a floor amendment shortly before House passage of the bill. The EEOC, originally charged with receiving and investigating employment discrimination charges and attempting to conciliate between the parties, quickly determined that it had no jurisdiction over complaints charging sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, and federal courts uniformly agreed with the EEOC.

The courts’ attitude began to change after the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that evidence of sex stereotyping by employers could support a sex discrimination charge under Title VII in the case of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228 (plurality opinion by Justice William J. Brennan), and in 1998 in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, 523 U.S. 75 (opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia), the Court suggested that Title VII could apply to a “same-sex harassment” case. Justice Scalia stated that Title VII’s application was not limited to the concerns of the legislators who voted for it, but would extend to “comparable evils.”

These two rulings were part of a series of cases in which the Supreme Court took an increasingly flexible approach to interpreting discrimination “because of sex,” which in turn led lower federal courts earlier in this century to reconsider their earlier rulings in LGBT discrimination cases. Federal appeals court rulings finding protection for transgender plaintiffs relied on Price Waterhouse’s sex stereotyping analysis, eventually leading the EEOC to rule in 2012 that a transgender applicant for a federal job, Mia Macy, could bring a Title VII claim against the federal employer. Macy v. Holder, 2012 WL 1435995. In 2015, the EEOC extended that analysis to a claim brought by a gay air traffic controller, David Baldwin, against the U.S. Transportation Department, Baldwin v. Foxx, 2015 WL 4397641, and the EEOC has followed up these rulings by filing discrimination claims in federal court on behalf of LGBT plaintiffs and appearing as amicus curiae in such cases as Zarda v. Altitude Express.

In the Harris Funeral Homes case, the 6^th Circuit became the first federal appeals court to go beyond the sex stereotype theory for gender identity discrimination claims, agreeing with the EEOC that discrimination because of gender identity is always discrimination because of sex, as it involves the employer taking account of the sex of the individual in making a personnel decision. The EEOC’s argument along the same lines for sexual orientation discrimination was adopted by the Chicago-based 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017 in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, 853 F.3d 339 (7^th Cir. en banc), a case that the losing employer did not appeal to the Supreme Court. In 2018, the 2^nd Circuit endorsed the EEOC’s view in the Zarda case.

During the oral argument of Zarda in the 2^nd Circuit, the judges expressed some amusement and confusion when an attorney for the EEOC argued in support of Zarda’s claim, and an attorney for the Justice Department argued in opposition. When the case was argued in September 2017, the EEOC still had a majority of commissioners appointed by President Obama who continued to support the Baldwin decision, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions took the position on behalf of the Justice Department that federal sex discrimination laws do not apply to sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination claims.

Due to the Trump Administration’s failure to fill vacancies on the EEOC, the Commission currently lacks a quorum and cannot decide new cases. Thus, the Solicitor General’s response for the government to Harris Funeral Home’s petition for review did not really present the position of the Commission, although the Solicitor General urged the Court to take up the sexual orientation cases and defer deciding the gender identity case. Perhaps this was a strategic recognition that unless the Court was going to back away from or narrow the Price Waterhouse ruling on sex stereotyping, it was more likely to uphold the 6^th Circuit’s gender identity ruling than the 2nd Circuit’s sexual orientation ruling in Zarda, since the role of sex stereotyping in a gender identity case seems more intuitively obvious to federal judges, at least as reflected in many district and appeals court decisions in recent years.

The Court sometimes tips its hand a bit when granting certiorari by reframing the questions posed by the Petitioner. It did not do this regarding sexual orientation, merely stating that it would consolidate the two cases and allot one hour for oral argument. Further instructions will undoubtedly come from the Court about how many attorneys will be allotted argument time, and whether the Solicitor General or the EEOC will argue on the sexual orientation issue as amicus curiae.

The Court was more informative as to Harris Funeral Homes, slightly rephrasing the question presented in the Petition. The Court said that the Petition “is granted limited to the following question: Whether Title VII prohibits discrimination against transgender people based on (1) their status as transgender or (2) sex stereotyping under Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins.” One wonders why the Supreme Court used the phrase “status as transgender” rather than “gender identity” in describing the first part of the question, since “gender identity” fits more neatly into the terminology of Title VII than a reference to “status.”

None of the members of the Court have addressed the questions presented in these three cases during their judicial careers up to this point, so venturing predictions about how these cases will be decided is difficult lacking pertinent information. The four most recent appointees to the Court with substantial federal judicial careers prior to their Supreme Court appointment – Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh – have never written a published opinion on sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, and neither did Chief Justice John Roberts during his brief service on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. However, it seems predictable that the justices most committed to construing civil rights laws narrowly in the context of the time when they were adopted will be skeptical about the argument that the 1964 statute can be interpreted to extend to sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination.

The counsel of record for Bostock is Brian J. Sutherland of Buckley Beal LLP, Atlanta. Clayton County, Georgia, retained Jack R. Hancock of Freeman Mathis & Gary LLP, of Forest Park, Georgia, to submit its response to the Bostock Petition. Counsel of record for Altitude Express is Saul D. Zabell of Bohemia, New York. The brief in opposition was filed on behalf of the Zarda Estate by Gregory Antollino of New York City. Zabell and Antollino were both trial counsel in the case and have pursued it through the appellate process. Several attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom, the Scottsdale, Arizona, based conservative religious liberty litigation group, represent Harris Funeral Home, and Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco’s office represents the EEOC. John A. Knight of the ACLU Foundation, Chicago, is counsel of record for Aimee Stephens. It is not unusual when the Supreme Court grants review for private parties to seek out experienced Supreme Court advocates to present their arguments to the Court, so some of these attorneys listed on the Petitions and other Briefs will likely not be appearing before the Court when the cases are argued next winter.

Supreme Court Sets Aside Colorado Commission Ruling in Wedding Cake Case, Condemning Government Hostility to Religion

Posted on: June 4th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

The United States Supreme Court ruled on June 4 that overt hostility to religion had tainted the decision process in the Colorado Civil Rights Commission when it ruled that baker Jack Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakeshop had unlawfully discriminated against Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins in 2012 by refusing to make them a wedding cake. Writing for the Court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy reaffirmed the right of the states to ban discrimination because of sexual orientation by businesses that sell goods and services to the public, but insisted that those charged with discrimination are entitled to a respectful consideration of their religious beliefs when charges against them are being adjudicated. Five other members of the Court – Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch – joined Kennedy’s opinion. Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 2018 U.S. LEXIS 3386, 2018 WL 2465172.

Kennedy found that the particular circumstances of this case fell short of the requirement that government be neutral in matters of religion. During the oral argument of the case in December, he had signaled this concern, making a troubling observation during the argument by Colorado’s Solicitor General, Frederick Yarger, who was defending the state court’s decision against the baker. Kennedy said, “Counselor, tolerance is essential in a free society. And tolerance is most meaningful when it’s mutual. It seems to me that the State in its position here has been neither tolerant nor respectful of Mr. Phillips’s religious beliefs.” In his opinion for the Court, Kennedy, noting comments made at the public hearing in this case by two of the state Commissioners, said, “The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here, however. The Civil Rights commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”

At the first public hearing, wrote Kennedy, “One commissioner suggested that Phillips can believe ‘what he wants to believe,’ but cannot act on his religious beliefs ‘if he decides to do business in the state.’” This commissioner also said, “If a businessman want to do business in the state and he’s got an issue with the – the law’s impacting his personal belief system, he needs to look at being able to compromise.” At the second hearing, a different commissioner spoke disparagingly about how “freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust, whether it be – I mean, we – we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to – to use their religion to hurt others.” Kennedy found these remarks to constitute disparagement of religion by commissioners who were supposed to be neutral when acting for the government in deciding a case. He emphasized that the record of the hearings “shows no objection to these comments from other commissioners” and that the state court of appeals ruling affirming the Commission’s decision did not mention these remarks.

Kennedy also noted that as of 2012, Colorado neither allowed nor recognized same-sex marriages, so Phillips could “reasonably believe” that he could refuse to make a cake for such a purpose. The factual record suggests that Phillips cited the state ban on same-sex marriage as a reason for his refusal, in addition to his own religious beliefs.

Kennedy invoked a 1993 decision by the Supreme Court, Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520, in which the Court held that overtly anti-religious bias by a legislative body that had enacted a ban on ritual slaughter of chickens directly aimed at the practices of a minority religious sect violated the Free Exercise Clause. Even though the statute, on its face, was neutral with respect to religion, and thus would normally be enforceable against anyone who engaged in the prohibited practice regardless of their religious or other motivation, the Court found that the openly articulated anti-religious sentiments of the legislative proponents had undercut the requirement of government neutrality with respect to religious practices. The only reason the municipality had passed the ordinance was to forbid ritual slaughter of chickens by members of this particular religious sect. Thus, it was not a neutral law, since it specifically targeted a particular religion’s practice. Similarly, in this case, Kennedy said, evidence of hostility to religion by the Commission members tainted the decisional process.

Kennedy observed that when the Court decided in Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), that same-sex couples have a fundamental right to marry, it had also noted that “the First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths.” At the time, dissenting Justices Alito and Antonin Scalia had emphasized the inevitable clashes that might occur in future as those with religious objections confronted the reality of same-sex marriages, and Scalia – as was his usual practice in dissents from Kennedy’s opinions in gay rights cases – ridiculed Kennedy’s statements as falling short of dealing with the clashes that were sure to occur. In this opinion, Kennedy develops the Obergefell dictum about religious objections further, but does not suggest that religious objectors enjoy a broad exemption from complying with public accommodations laws.

Justice Kagan filed a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Breyer, generally joining the Court’s reasoning but disavowing Kennedy’s reliance on evidence from a stunt conceived by William Jack, a religious opponent of same-sex marriage who filed an amicus brief in the case. Upon hearing about the Masterpiece Cakeshop discrimination charge, Mr. Jack had approached three other Colorado bakers, asking them to make a cake decorated with pictures and Biblical quotations derogatory of same-sex marriage and gay people, and all three bakers refused his request because they found the desired product to be offensive. Jack filed charges of religious discrimination against them, but the Colorado commission rejected his charges, finding that the bakers had a right to refuse to make cakes conveying messages they found offensive. Jack then argued – persuasively, in the view of Kennedy, Roberts, Alito and Gorsuch – that the Commission’s different treatment of the charges against the other bakers as compared to its treatment of Jack Phillips showed the Commission’s hostility to religious beliefs. Justice Clarence Thomas, whose separate concurring opinion was joined only by Gorsuch, also found Jack’s arguments persuasive.

Kagan’s concurring opinion argued that the other baker cases were distinguishable. She pointed out that Jack had asked the bakers to make a cake that they would have refused to make for any customer, regardless of their religion or sexual orientation. By contrast, Phillips refused to make a wedding cake that he would happily have sold to different-sex couples but refused to sell to same-sex couples. In the former case, there is no discrimination on grounds prohibited by the Colorado statute. Gorsuch, in his separate concurrence (with which Justice Alito joined), insisted that the three bakers were discriminating against Jack based on his religious beliefs, and insisted on distinguishing between a cake to “celebrate a same-sex marriage” and a generic “wedding cake.”

Interestingly, the Court’s opinion focused on free exercise of religion and evaded ruling on the other main argument advanced by Jack Phillips: that requiring him to bake the cake would be a form of compelled speech prohibited by the First Amendment freedom of speech clause. The Trump Administration had come into the case in support of Phillips’ appeal, but limited its argument to the free speech contention, which Gorsuch and Thomas also embraced in their concurring opinions.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented in an opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She minimized the significance of the statements by the two Colorado commissioners. “Whatever one may think of the statements in historical context,” she wrote, “I see no reason why the comments of one or two Commissioners should be taken to overcome Phillips’ refusal to sell a wedding cake to Craig and Mullins. The proceedings involved several layers of independent decisionmaking, of which the Commission was but one. First, the Division had to find probable cause that Phillips violated [the statute]. Second, the [Administrative Law Judge] entertained the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment. Third, the Commission heard Phillips’ appeal. Fourth, after the Commission’s ruling, the Colorado Court of Appeals considered the case de novo. What prejudice infected the determinations of the adjudicators in the case before and after the Commission? The Court does not say. Phillips’ case is thus far removed from the only precedent upon which the Court relies, Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, where the government action that violated a principle of religious neutrality implicated a sole decisionmaking body, the city council.”

Ginsburg focused her dissent on a series of statements from Kennedy’s opinion which make clear that the Court’s ruling does not endorse some sort of broad exemption for religious from complying with anti-discrimination laws, including the following: “It is a general rule that [religious and philosophical] objections do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law.” “Colorado law can protect gay persons, just as it can protect other classes of individuals, in acquiring whatever products and services they choose on the same terms and conditions as are offered to other members of the public.” “Purveyors of goods and services who object to gay marriages for moral and religious reasons [may not] put up signs saying ‘no goods or services will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages.’” Gay persons may be spared from “indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.” She pointed out that all of these statements “point in the opposite direction” from the Court’s conclusion that Phillips should win his appeal.

The narrowness, and possibly limited precedential weight of the Court’s opinion were well expressed by Kennedy, when he wrote, “the delicate question of when the free exercise of [Phillips’] religion must yield to an otherwise valid exercise of state power needed to be determined in an adjudication in which religious hostility on the part of the State itself would not be a factor in the balance the State sought to reach. That requirement, however, was not met here. When the Colorado Civil Rights Commission considered this case, it did not do so with the religious neutrality that the Constitution requires.” Taking together the date of the incident (2012), the inconsistency Kennedy saw with the Commission’s treatment of the bakers who turned down Jack’s order for the gay-disparaging cakes, and the comments by the commissioners at the hearing, Kennedy wrote, “it is proper to hold that whatever the outcome of some future controversy involving facts similar to these, the Commission’s actions here violated the Free Exercise Clause, and its order must be set aside.” Justice Kagan agreed that in this case the State’s decision was “infected by religious hostility or bias,” although she (and Breyer) disagreed that the Commission’s treatment of Jack’s complaint against the three bakers supported this conclusion, finding that situation distinguishable.

Gorsuch and Thomas would have gone beyond the Court’s opinion to find a violation of Phillips’ freedom of speech as well. Kennedy wrote, “The free speech aspect of this case is difficult, for few persons who have seen a beautiful wedding cake might have thought of its creation as an exercise of protected speech. This is an instructive example, however, of the proposition that the application of constitutional freedoms in new contexts can deepen our understanding of their meaning.” But he took this issue no further, instead focusing on the hostility to religion he found reflected in the Colorado commission record. Thus, the Court’s holding is narrowly focused on the requirement of neutrality toward religion by government actors. Gorsuch and Thomas, by contrast, found the compelled-speech argument compelling.

The next shoe to drop on the possible significance of this ruling may come quickly. Also on June 4, the Court listed for conference distribution the petition and responses filed with the Court in State of Washington v. Arlene’s Flowers, Inc., 187 Wash.2d 804, 389 P.3d 543 (Wash., February 16, 2017), petition for certiorari filed, July 21, 2017, for discussion at its June 7 conference, the results of which will probably be announced on June 11. Arlene’s Flowers refused to provide floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding, and was found by the state civil rights agency and the Washington state courts to be in violation of the public accommodations statute. Arlene’s petition was filed last summer, but no action was taken by the Court pending a decision of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. If the Court denies the petition, that would reinforce the view that the Masterpiece ruling is narrowly focused on the evidence of “hostility to religion” by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and that absent similar evidence in the Washington state adjudication record, the Court is willing to leave the Washington Supreme Court ruling against Arlene’s Flowers in place. However, the Court might grant the petition and remand the case to the Washington Supreme Court for reconsideration in light of Masterpiece. This could respond to Justice Kennedy’s observation that the Colorado Court of Appeals decision did not even mention the commissioner remarks that aroused Justice Kennedy’s ire at oral argument and that were a significant factor in the Supreme Court’s decision. A remand to the Washington court could implicitly direct that court to examine the adjudication record for any signs of hostility to religion at any stage in that proceeding.

Interestingly, the Oregon Supreme Court recently heard oral argument in a similar wedding cake case, Klein d/b/a Sweetcakes by Melissa v. Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, 410 P.3d 1051 (Court of Appeals of Oregon, December 28, 2017), appeal pending before the Oregon Supreme Court (argued in May, 2018). A ruling by the Oregon court could provide the first sign of how lower courts will interpret Masterpiece Cakeshop, depending whether the Oregon adjudication record shows signs of hostility to religion. Interestingly, this case was instigated not by the same-sex couple who were denied service but rather by the state’s attorney general, reacting to press reports about the denial.

It is occasionally difficult when the Supreme Court issues a ruling in a controversial case to determine exactly what the ruling means for future cases. Ultimately, the meaning of a case as precedent will depend on the factual context of subsequent cases, and on which statements by the justices are seized upon by lower court judges to support their conclusion about how the later cases should be decided. Kennedy’s own words suggest that these analyses will necessarily be heavily influenced by the facts of those cases. As he wrote in conclusion: “The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts, all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.”

At the oral argument, Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop were represented by Kristen K. Waggoner of Alliance Defending Freedom, the Scottsdale, Arizona, based religious advocacy firm whose donors are funding this appeal. Donald Trump’s appointee as Solicitor General, Noel J. Francisco, made his first appearance before the Court in this capacity to argue the Administration’s freedom of speech position. As noted above, Colorado Solicitor General Frederick R. Yarger appeared in support of the Commission’s ruling, and David D. Cole, an ACLU attorney, argued on behalf of Craig and Mullins.

I did an interview on NYC-based radio station WBAI on Monday, June 11, focused mainly on discussing this case. Here’s the link:

https://archive.org/details/ProfArthurLeonardSeg61118MGH

Nebraska Supreme Court Ends State’s Anti-LGBT Adoption/Foster Policies

Posted on: April 12th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

The seven-member Nebraska Supreme Court has unanimously affirmed a decision by Lancaster County District Judge John A. Colborn that a formal published policy adopted by the state in 1995 banning adoptions or foster placements into any household with a “homosexual” in residence was unconstitutional, as was an informal policy adopted more recently by chief executive officers of the state’s Department of Health and Human Services under which “exceptions” could be made in particular cases by personal order of the department’s director.

Ruling on a case brought by the ACLU on behalf of some same-sex couples who sought to foster or adopt children but were either discouraged by Department staff members or deterred by the formal policy posted on the Department’s website, Stewart v. Heineman, 296 Neb. 262, the Supreme Court focused mainly on technical issues, as the state apparently conceded that there was no good reason to single out gay and lesbian adults for discriminatory treatment and sought to persuade the court that the case was “moot” and should be dismissed, preferably without awarding costs and fees to the plaintiffs. The trial judge awarded costs and fees totaling more than $175,000, an amount that will increase if fees are later awarded to the plaintiffs for successfully defending their victory in the state supreme court.

The lengthy opinion by Justice John F. Wright is devoted almost entirely to refuting ridiculous arguments mounted by the state to try to convince the court that it lacked jurisdiction to decide the case, rather than to repeating in any detail the evidence presented to the district court about the parenting abilities of lesbians and gay men and the wholesome, well-adjusted children they have raised when given the opportunity to do so.

The complaint the ACLU filed centered on Memo 1-95, an administrative memorandum written by the director of the Department of Social Services (which later became the Department of Health and Human Services) in 1995. The memo stated: “It is my decision that effective immediately, it is the policy of the Department of Social Services that children will not be placed in the homes of persons who identify themselves as homosexuals. This policy also applies to the area of foster home licensure in that, effective immediately, no foster home license shall be issued to persons who identify themselves as homosexuals.” The memo adopted a similar policy regarding “unmarried heterosexual couples.” The memo “directed staff not to specifically ask about an individual’s sexual orientation or marital status beyond those inquiries already included in the licensing application and home study,” wrote Justice Wright. “The stated reason for the policy was this State’s intent to place children in the most ‘family-like setting’ when out-of-home care is necessary,” Wright continued. The memo contemplated that a formal regulation incorporating its policy decisions would be adopted, but this did not happen.

In fact, there is no formal statutory or regulatory ban on gay people being foster or adoptive parents in Nebraska, as such. Thus, the entire focus of the lawsuit and the court opinions was on the “policy” expressed in Memo 1-95 and subsequent “practices” adopted by the director of the department.

The Memo was posted on the Department’s website as a formal policy statement, and was not removed from the website until after this lawsuit began and motions for summary judgment had been filed with Judge Colborn. The Memo was used in training new staff members, and was referred to specifically by staff members when they discouraged one of the couples from formally applying to get a foster child, which is a prerequisite in Nebraska to legal adoption.

Part of the state’s defense in this case was that although Memo 1-95 continued to appear on the website, it was no longer the actual policy of the Department, as recent chief executive officers had determined that lesbian and gay applicants otherwise qualified to serve as foster or adoptive parents should be allowed to do so. However, this informal policy was not well publicized throughout the department, formal instructions were not issued at the line staff level, and no mechanism for appealing denials based on an applicant’s sexual orientation was created.

Under this “practice,” which was referred to throughout the opinion as the Pristow Procedure, after Thomas Pristow, director of the Division beginning in March 2012, if gay applicants were approved at the line staff level, the approval had to go through four layers of sign-offs, including by Pristow himself. No other potentially controversial placements, such as those with unmarried heterosexual parents or with former prison inmates, had to go through so many layers of approval, and only placements with “homosexuals” had to be personally approved by the director.

An earlier form of this policy “exception” was first adopted by Todd Reckling when he was director in June 2010, expressed in a letter to two gay men, Todd Vesely and Joel Busch, who had begun the process of qualifying to be foster and adoptive parents in 2008, completing the training program. Reckling wrote them that the division’s policy was to bar licensing unrelated adults living together, referring to Memo 1-95, but that the division’s policy “allows for an exception” under which one member of an unmarried couple might be licensed, but Reckling’s letter “gave no indication that such an exception would be made in their case” because, as Reckling explained, “second parent adoptions” were not permitted in Nebraska involving unmarried couples, and Todd and Joel could not marry because of Nebraska’s anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment. Neither would their marriage be recognized if contracted out of state.

One of the state’s incredible arguments was that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the lawsuit because none of the couples had formally applied and been turned down. This was a nonsensical argument, since it was clear that any gay couple applying had to be rejected under the formal policy posted on the website and taught to staff members. In reviewing the deposition testimony of the various directors of the division and other staff members, as well as their internal written communications, the court uncovered the entire history of developments within the department as this issue unfolded. When pressed about why Memo 1-95 remained for so long on the website despite insistence by some of the witnesses that it was no longer the “practice” of the division, witnesses intimated that they wanted to prevent the possibility that a formal withdrawal of the memo would provoke the state legislature to pass an explicit ban on “homosexuals” serving as foster or adoptive parents, as had happened in some other states when the issue aroused public attention.

The defense witnesses struggled to define the difference between a “policy” and a “practice,” and to argue that because the complaint filed in this case only explicitly attacked 1-95 as a “policy,” the court should not consider whether the “practice” actually followed was constitutional. Of course, since the “practice” was never formally published, it turns out that the plaintiffs did not learn of it until after filing their complaint and conducting discovery. The court turned aside formalistic objections to extending the lawsuit to consider the “practice,” and agreed with Judge Colborn that the “practice” as variously described in depositions and internal division communications was itself discriminatory.

The defense witnesses could advance no good reason why approval of gay people to be foster or adoptive parents should require five layers of approval culminating in personal approval by the CEO, a degree of internal scrutiny that was not demanded of any other class of applicants.

The court also rejected the defendants’ argument that the case was not “ripe” for decision because nobody had been turned down under the “practice”, now that the Memo has been removed from the website. Interestingly, however, the opinion does not mention any evidence that any gay foster or adoptive parents have actually been approved. The defendants argued that none of the plaintiffs have yet incurred the injury of formally being denied, so it was premature for the court to rule on the merits. But the court noted plentiful U.S. Supreme Court precedents adopting the view that a denial of equal treatment was itself an injury, even if it was in the form of an official policy that had deterred individuals from applying and thus had not resulted in any formal denials.

Approving the district court’s decision to issue an injunction against the “policy” and the “practice,” Justice Wright quoted from U.S. Supreme Court opinions, that the Court had “repeatedly emphasized” that “discrimination itself, by perpetuating ‘archaic and stereotypic notions’ or by stigmatizing members of the disfavored group as ‘innately inferior’ and therefore as less worthy participants in the political community, can cause serious noneconomic injuries to those persons who are personally denied equal treatment solely because of their membership in a disfavored group.”

As to the “ripeness” issue in the context of a “reverse-discrimination” attack on a governmental affirmative action contracting policy, the Supreme Court has said “that the plaintiffs seeking to prevent future deprivation of the equal opportunity to compete need only demonstrate they will ‘sometime in the relatively near future’ bid on a contracted governed by such race-based financial incentives.”

The court also rejected the state’s contention that the case was “moot” because Memo 1-95 had been removed from the website. The court noted that the Memo had not been formally withdrawn, since it was not included on a website list of withdrawn memoranda, presumably so as not to call the legislature’s attention to its withdrawal.

“If a discriminatory policy is openly declared,” wrote Wright, “then it is unnecessary for a plaintiff to demonstrate it is followed in order to obtain injunctive or declaratory relief. We thus find immaterial any dispute in the record as to whether the Pristow Procedure was a policy versus a practice, whether it ‘replaced’ Memo 1-95, or the level of confusion within DHHS and its contractors concerning DHHS’ policy and practice when this action was filed. A secret change in policy or procedure cannot moot an action based on a published policy statement that has been cited by the agency as excluding the plaintiffs from eligibility.”

Furthermore, the court said that a party cannot “moot” a case “simply by ending its unlawful conduct once sued,” because if such “voluntary cessation” rendered the case “moot”, causing its dismissal, “a defendant could engage in unlawful conduct, stop when sued to have the case declared moot, then pick up where he left off, repeating this cycle until he achieves all his unlawful ends.”

In the final section of his opinion, Justice Wright’s discussion intimated what this appeal is really all about. The state is not actually contesting Judge Colborn’s conclusion that the policy or practice is unconstitutional. Rather, hoping to get the case dismissed as moot, the state wants to be in a position to argue that it should not have to pay court costs and attorney’s fees to the plaintiffs! They argued that the trial court abused its discretion in awarding costs and fees, and should have declared the case moot and dismissed it when the state removed 1-95 from its website. The court wasn’t falling for this sophistry, however.

The April 7 opinion is a total rejection of all the arguments the state raised on appeal, and a total endorsement of Judge Colborn’s summary judgment order of August 5, 2015, which ordered the defendants to “refrain from adopting or applying policies, procedures, or review processes that treat gay and lesbian individuals and couples differently from similarly situated heterosexual individuals and couples when evaluating foster care or adoption applications under the ‘best interests of the child’ standard set forth in DHHS’ regulations.” The district court issued an order on December 15, 2015, awarding $28,849.25 in costs and $145,111.30 in attorney fees.

Lead attorneys for the plaintiffs are Amy Miller of the ACLU of Nebraska, Leslie Cooper of the national ACLU’s LGBT Rights Project, and cooperating attorneys Garrard R. Beeney and W. Rudolph Kleysteuber of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. Amicus briefs in support of plaintiffs were filed by Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest and the Child Welfare League of America.

2nd Circuit Panel Rejects Sexual Orientation Discrimination Claim Under Title VII, but Revives Sex-Stereotyping Claim by Gay Man

Posted on: March 27th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2^nd Circuit, based in Manhattan, has issued a mixed ruling concerning a gay man’s claim that he was sexually harassed in his workplace in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In a per curiam opinion in Christiansen v. Omnicom Group, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 5278, 2017 WL 1130183, the court ruled on March 27 that plaintiff Matthew Christiansen could not sue under Title VII on a claim of sexual orientation discrimination because of existing circuit precedents, but that he could maintain his lawsuit on a claim that he was the victim of unlawful sex stereotyping by his employer. Thus, the case was sent back to U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla (S.D.N.Y.), who last year had granted the employer’s motion to dismiss all federal claims in the case and to decline to exercise jurisdiction over state law claims; see 167 F. Supp. 3d 598.

The ruling on this appeal, which was argued on January 20, was much awaited because it was the first time for the 2^nd Circuit to address the sexual orientation issue since the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) reversed its position, held for half a century, and ruled in 2015 that sexual orientation discrimination claims should be treated as sex discrimination claims subject to Title VII, which prohibits discrimination “because of sex.”

In a separate concurring opinion, Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, joined by U.S. District Judge Margo K. Brodie, suggested that if the full 2^nd Circuit bench, which can change a circuit precedent, were to consider the question, Katzmann and Brodie would find that sexual orientation discrimination claims can be litigated under Title VII. The other member of the panel, Circuit Judge Debra Ann Livingston, did not join the concurring opinion.

Christiansen, described in the opinion as “an openly gay man who is HIV-positive,” worked at DDB Worldwide Communications Group, an advertising agency based in New York that is a subsidiary of Omnicom Group. He alleged that his direct supervisor subjected him to humiliating harassment “targeting his effeminacy and sexual orientation.” This began in the spring and summer of 2011, a time when marriage equality in New York was much in the news as the legislature prepared to vote upon and pass the marriage equality bill. The supervisor, who is not named in the opinion, “drew multiple sexually suggestive and explicit drawings of Christiansen on an office whiteboard.” These graphic drawings “depicted a naked, muscular Christiansen with an erect penis, holding a manual air pump and accompanied by a text bubble reading, ‘I’m so pumped for marriage equality.’”

There was another picture that “depicted Christiansen in tights and a low-cut shirt ‘prancing around.’” Yet another showed his “torso on the body of ‘a four legged animal with a tail and penis, urinating and defecating.’” Later in 2011, the same supervisor “circulated at work and posted to Facebook a ‘Muscle Beach Party” poster that depicted various employees’ heads on the bodies of people in beach attire,” including Christiansen’s head “attached to a female body clad in a bikini, lying on the ground with her legs upright in the air in a manner that one coworker thought depicted Christiansen as ‘a submissive sissy.’”

The supervisor also made remarks about “the connection between effeminacy, sexual orientation, and HIV status,” and allegedly told other employees that Christiansen “was effeminate and gay so he must have AIDS.” The supervisor made other references to AIDS in connection with Christiansen, although at the time Christiansen was keeping his HIV-status private. Christiansen included a disability discrimination claim in his complaint, but the district court found that his factual allegations were not sufficient to maintain a claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act, a conclusion that Christiansen did not appeal.

Christiansen filed a complaint with the EEOC in 2014, describing the harassment in detail, and upon receiving the agency’s notice of right to sue, filed his lawsuit in the federal court in Manhattan, which the defendants quickly moved to dismiss. Christiansen alleged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title VII for his federal claims, and also alleged violations of New York State and city anti-discrimination laws. The employer argued that his claim under Title VII was really a sexual orientation discrimination claim rather than a gender stereotyping claim, and the district judge agreed.

The state of precedent in the 2^nd Circuit has frequently been questioned by federal trial courts in the circuit as confusing and difficult to apply. The Circuit has ruled that under Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228 (1989), an employee, including a gay or lesbian employee, can bring a sex discrimination claim involving sex stereotyping, but if the court perceives that the employer’s mistreatment of the employee was really due to the employee’s sexual orientation, the claim will be rejected. These precedents date from 2000 (Simonton v. Runyon, 232 F.3d 33) and 2005 (Dawson v. Bumble & Bumble, 398 F.3d 211). They predate the Supreme Court’s decisions striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (U.S. v. Windsor, 133 S.Ct. 2675) and state bans on same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Windsor, 135 S. Ct. 2584), as well as the EEOC’s 2015 ruling recognizing sexual orientation discrimination claims under Title VII. While none of these later rulings produced a precedent binding on the 2^nd Circuit that sexual orientation claims are covered under Title VII, they have “changed the landscape,” as Judge Katzmann wrote in his concurring opinion.

The per curiam opinion premised its holding squarely on the rule that circuit precedents can only be revised or reversed by the Supreme Court or the full circuit bench sitting en banc. Thus, the panel ruled that it was precluded from reconsidering Simonton and Dawson.

However, the panel disagreed with Judge Failla’s conclusion that there was too much about sexual orientation in Christiansen’s complaint to allow him to proceed with a gender stereotyping sex discrimination claim under Title VII. The panel pointed out that the 2^nd Circuit has never ruled that gay people may not sue under Title VII when they have substantial evidence of gender stereotyping to present, provided that such evidence is not limited to the argument that sexual orientation discrimination is itself a form of sex stereotyping. That is, the Title VII claim may not based, under current circuit precedent, on the argument that men loving men and women loving men is a violation of gender stereotypes in and of itself. In this case, the panel wrote that there were enough allegations of gender stereotyping as such to survive the employer’s motion to dismiss.

“The district court commented that much more of the complaint was devoted to sexual orientation discrimination allegations than gender stereotyping discrimination allegations and that it thus might be difficult for Christiansen to withstand summary judgment or prove at trial that he was harassed because of his perceived effeminacy and flouting of gender stereotypes rather than because of his sexual orientation.” But the court pointed out that Christiansen’s burden at this initial stage of the litigation was not to show that he would prevail at later stages. Rather, it was enough for him to “state a claim that is plausible on its face” that he was subjected to harassment because of non-conformity to male gender stereotypes.

Judge Katzmann noted in his concurrence that because Christiansen was also alleging violations of state and local laws forbidding sexual orientation discrimination as well as a violation of Title VII, it was to be expected that his factual allegations would cover both kinds of claims. While joining in the per curiam opinion, Judge Katzmann wrote separately to express his view “that when the appropriate occasion presents itself, it would make sense for the Court to revisit the central legal issue confronted in Simonton and Dawson, especially in light of the changing legal landscape that has taken shape in the nearly two decades since Simonton issued.”

He went on to identify three theories under which sexual orientation discrimination claims should be treated as sex discrimination claims under Title VII, drawing heavily on the EEOC’s 2015 decision. First, he wrote, “sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination for the simple reason that such discrimination treats otherwise similarly-situated people differently solely because of their sex.” The EEOC has observed, he wrote, that “sexual orientation ‘cannot be defined or understood without reference to sex,’ because sexual orientation is defined by whether a person is attracted to people of the same sex or opposite sex (or both, or neither).” Thus, according to the EEOC, “sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination because it necessarily entails treating an employee less favorably because of the employee’s sex.”

The second theory follows a 2^nd Circuit ruling from 2008, Holcomb v. Iona College, 521 F.3d 130 (2008), where the circuit formally embraced the associational discrimination theory that other courts have applied in race discrimination cases. If an employee suffers discrimination because he is involved in an interracial relationship, the courts will recognize his claim of race discrimination in violation of Title VII. By analogy, discriminating against an employee because of a same-sex relationship is quite simply sex discrimination. In Price Waterhouse, the Supreme Court had commented that Title VII “on its face treats each of the enumerated categories exactly the same.” Thus, if employees in interracial relationships are protected from race discrimination, then employees in same-sex relationships should be protected from sex discrimination.

Finally, of course, there is gender stereotyping, including the kind of stereotyping that the 2^nd Circuit has not yet accepted as violating Title VII, the stereotype that men should be attracted only to women and women only to men. “Relying on common sense and intuition rather than any ‘special training,’” wrote Katzmann, “courts have explained that sexual orientation discrimination ‘is often, if not always, motivated by a desire to enforce heterosexually defined gender norms. In fact, stereotypes about homosexuality are directly related to our stereotypes about the proper roles of men and women.’” Katzmann noted that the circuit in Dawson had pointed out that “stereotypical notions about how men and women should behave will often necessarily blur into ideas about heterosexuality and homosexuality.” He continued, “Having conceded this, it is logically untenable for us to insist that this particular gender stereotype is outside of the gender stereotype discrimination prohibition articulated in Price Waterhouse,” and concluded that this particular stereotype about sexual attraction is “as clear a gender stereotype as any.”

At the same time, he rejected the argument, raised by some courts, that because Congress has been considering unsuccessful efforts to pass a federal ban on sexual orientation discrimination since the 1970s, the courts are precluded through interpreting Title VII to ban such discrimination. When the circuit decided Simonton in 2000, it reached the same conclusion that all other federal circuit courts had then reached on this issue. “But in the years since,” he wrote, “the legal landscape has substantially changed,” citing Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (the sodomy law case) and Obergefell v. Hodges (the marriage equality case), “affording greater legal protection to gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals. During the same period,” he observed, “societal understanding of same-sex relationships has evolved considerably.” Thus, he wrote, despite the failed legislative proposals, there is “no justification in the statutory language for a categorical rule” excluding sexual orientation claims.

“I respectfully think that in the context of an appropriate case our Court should consider reexamining the holding that sexual orientation discrimination claims are not cognizable under Title VII. Other federal courts are also grappling with this question, and it well may be that the Supreme Court will ultimately address it.”

The other cases are in the 7^th Circuit, where the full bench heard argument on November 30 on this question, and the 11^th Circuit, where a petition for en banc review is being filed by Lambda seeking reversal of a 2-1 adverse panel decision issued a few weeks ago. There is also another panel case argued in January in the 2^nd Circuit, although the circuit rule on precedent will likely produce the same result in that case, which does not include a separate gender non-conformity allegation.

Christiansen is represented by Susan Chana Lask, a New York attorney whose Complaint in this case originally cast the federal claim as a sex stereotyping claim. Now that the case is being sent back to the district court to be litigated on the stereotyping theory, the plaintiff need not seek full circuit en banc review to proceed and seek discovery to produce evidence in support of his claim.

The case attracted widespread amicus participation, including a brief filed by the EEOC, another from a long list of civil rights organizations led by the ACLU, and briefs on behalf of 128 members of Congress, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Lambda Legal, all arguing that the court should allow the case to proceed as a sexual orientation discrimination case.

Federal Discrimination Agency Says Gays Are Protected Against Employment Discrimination

Posted on: July 19th, 2015 by Art Leonard No Comments

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that enforces Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, issued a decision on July 15 holding for the first time that Title VII’s ban on employment discrimination because of sex includes discrimination against somebody because they are gay, lesbian or bisexual. This marks a complete turnaround by the EEOC from the position taken by the agency throughout all of its 50 year history. The Commission, acting in its appellate capacity, overruled a 2013 agency decision that had rejected a discrimination claim by a man who had been denied a permanent Front Line Manager position by the Federal Aviation Administration. As is customary with such administrative rulings by the EEOC, the decision does not give the name of the man, referring throughout to the “Complainant.” Baldwin v. Foxx (Anthony Foxx, Secretary, Department of Transportation), 2015 WL 4397641 (EEOC, July 15, 2015).

The EEOC went into business in July 1965 when Title VII took effect. That statute was the result of prolonged struggle in Congress, including a lengthy filibuster in the Senate led by southern conservative Democrats opposed to racial integration of the workplace. Almost all of the attention around Title VII focused on the proposal for a federal ban on race discrimination in employment. The bill originally introduced in the House of Representatives was limited to race or color, religion and national origin as prohibited grounds of discrimination. The relevant House committees did study sex discrimination issues, but decided that the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, which prohibited compensating men and women at different rates for the same work, was sufficient, and proponents of the bill feared that adding a general prohibition on sex discrimination would endanger the bill’s passage. Nonetheless, on the floor of the House, Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia, a long-time proponent of equal legal rights for women, introduced an amendment to add sex, which was passed by an unlikely alliance of pro-feminist liberals and southern conservatives. Some of the southerners probably supported the amendment hoping that this would make the final bill more difficult to pass. Because “sex” was added as a floor amendment, the committee reports on the bill do not discuss it, and Smith’s amendment did not add any definition of sex to the definitional section of the bill, merely adding the word “sex” to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination wherever that list appeared in the bill.

After the bill passed the House, it went to the Senate under a deal worked out by the leadership to by-pass the committee process, in order to prevent it from being bottled up in committee by the conservative southern Democratic chair of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Eastland, who was a sworn opponent of the bill. Instead the measure went directly to the Senate floor under a procedure that allowed little opportunity for amendments. There was some brief discussion about the inclusion of sex but nothing really illuminating, apart from a floor amendment attempting to reconcile the bill with the Equal Pay Act, the meaning of which wasn’t settled until a Supreme Court ruling several years later.

Consequently, the “legislative history” provides no help in figuring out what kind of discrimination Congress intended to ban when it voted to add “sex” to the list of prohibited grounds of employment discrimination. Without such guidance, the EEOC and the courts were left to their own devices in trying to figure out what this meant, and the conclusion they reached early in the history of Title VII was that it was intended to prohibit discrimination against women because they were women or against men because they were men. As such, both the EEOC and many courts ruled beginning shortly after the Act went into effect that it did not apply to discrimination because of a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, both concepts that were largely missing from American jurisprudence during the 1960s. One commonsense reason usually raised by courts in rejecting such discrimination claims was that if Congress had intended to ban these forms of discrimination, there surely would have been some mention during the debates over the bill. They have also pointed to the fact that bills to add sexual orientation and gender identity to Title VII or to enact a free-standing law addressing such discrimination have been frequently introduced in Congress since the early 1970s, but no such measure has ever been enacted. Some courts have construed this history to reflect Congress’s view that Title VII does not already ban such discrimination.

A Supreme Court decision from 1989, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, initiated a changing landscape for sexuality issues under Title VII. Ann Hopkins, rejected for a partnership at Price Waterhouse, won a ruling from the Supreme Court that sex stereotypes held by some of the partners who voted against her application violated her rights under Title VII. Writing for a plurality of the Court, Justice William J. Brennan said that Title VII applied to discrimination because of gender, not just biological sex. Later courts seized upon this to justify taking a broader view of sex discrimination under Title VII. By early in this century, there was a growing body of federal court rulings suggesting that LGBT people might be protected to some extent under Title VII, depending on the nature of their case. If the discrimination they suffered could be described in terms of sex stereotypes, or if they could show that they had been the victim of sexual harassment that turned in some way on their gender, they might be able to maintain a legal claim of discrimination.

Within the past few years, the EEOC has taken a leading role in making these developments more concrete, first by its treatment of discrimination claims within the internal investigative process, and then through its decision-making on discrimination claims brought against federal agencies, where the Commission plays an important appellate role reviewing rulings by federal agencies on internal employment grievances. In 2012, the EEOC ruled in a case against the Justice Department that a transgender woman who was denied a position because of her gender identity had a valid claim under Title VII. Macy v. Dep’t of Justice, 2012 Westlaw 1435995 (April 20, 2012). This ruling echoed many then-recent federal court decisions, including some by courts of appeals, finding that discrimination because of gender identity almost always involves sex stereotyping by the discriminating employer. Late last year, the agency and then the Justice Department concluded that all gender identity discrimination claims could be investigated and prosecuted under Title VII. Pushing that position forward, the Justice Department has filed suit on behalf of the EEOC or joined ongoing private cases in federal court seeking to move the courts beyond the stereotyping theory to a straightforward acceptance that gender identity discrimination is sex discrimination.

The new July 15 ruling by the EEOC seeks to achieve the same thing for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals confronting employment discrimination. While acknowledging the significance of the Supreme Court’s Price Waterhouse decision and sex stereotyping theory in widening the agency’s appreciation of the scope of sex discrimination, this ruling takes things a step further. “In the case before us,” wrote the Commission, “we conclude that Complainant’s claim of sexual orientation discrimination alleges that the Agency relied on sex-based considerations and took his sex into account in its employment decision regarding the permanent FLM position. The Complainant, therefore, has stated a claim of sex discrimination. Indeed, we conclude that sexual orientation is inherently a ‘sex-based consideration,’ and an allegation of discrimination based on sexual orientation is necessarily an allegation of sex discrimination under Title VII. A complainant alleging that an agency took his or her sexual orientation into account in an employment action necessarily alleges that the agency took his or her sex into account.”

The Commission amplified this conclusion with an extended discussion, grounding its conclusion in rulings by several federal courts and pointing especially to the well-established principle that discriminating against somebody because of the race of their sexual partner has long been deemed by the Commission and the courts to be race discrimination. Logically, then, discriminating against somebody because of the sex of their sexual partners would be sex discrimination. The Commission also referenced the recent marriage equality litigation, noting the Supreme Court’s statement in Obergefell v. Hodges that laws prohibiting same-sex marriage “abridge central precepts of equality.” Of course, the Commission also explained that recent court rulings have made clear that stereotyped thinking about proper gender roles, as well as behavior, underlies much sexual orientation discrimination, thus providing a firm theoretical justification in the Supreme Court’s Price Waterhouse case.

What is the significance of this EEOC ruling? It is likely to result in the agency initiating federal court litigation, enlisting the Justice Department, to push this interpretation of Title VII into the courts. Although federal courts are not bound by an administrative agency’s interpretations of their governing statutes, the Supreme Court has frequently deferred to agency interpretations when they are seen as consistent with the statutory language and overall congressional purpose, and constitute a reasonable interpretation of the statute. Here is where the EEOC’s past rulings may result in less deference than courts otherwise might give. When an agency “changes its mind” about an issue, courts may be skeptical about whether the new ruling is more political than legalistic. So it may be premature to assume that this ruling by the EEOC means that we have no need to enact explicit federal protection through a vehicle such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which has been pending in one form or another in Congress since 1993.

Ironically, this EEOC action comes at a time when LGBT political leaders have largely abandoned ENDA, finding it too narrowly focused on employment. Objections have also been raised to the extremely broad religious exemption contained in ENDA. One of the major lobbying victories last summer was persuading the Obama Administration not to include the broad ENDA-style religious exemption in President Obama’s executive order banning sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination by federal contractors. Lobbyists are now working with legislators on a broader, comprehensive LGBT civil rights bill, expected to be introduced this summer, that would go beyond employment to cover other areas traditionally covered by federal law, including housing, public services and public accommodations. In the meantime, however, it will certainly be useful for the federal government’s primary civil rights enforcement agency, the EEOC, to be on record that sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination. EEOC’s view may be influential with the agencies that enforce the Fair Housing Act and the other titles of the Civil Rights Act, and its analysis may prove persuasive to the courts, regardless of the level of deference it receives.

The vote on this decision is not indicated in the opinion (which was drafted by the Commission’s staff), but was reported in the press as a party-line vote of 3-2. Under the statute, the five-member Commission may not have more than three commissioners who are members of the same political party. The two Republicans on the Commission voted against this decision, but did not issue a written dissent. A prime mover behind the EEOC’s expanded view of sex discrimination to encompass gender identity and sexual orientation claims has been Commissioner Chai Feldblum, the first openly gay member of the Commission, who was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate for a second term last year.

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