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Landmark Federal Appeals Ruling Holds Sexual Orientation Discrimination Violates Title VII

Posted on: April 5th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

The full bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, based in Chicago, substantially advanced the cause of gay rights on April 4, releasing an unprecedented decision in Kimberly Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, 2017 WL 1230393, holding that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which applies generally to all employers with fifteen or more employees as well as many federal, state and local government operations, prohibits discriminating against a person because of their sexual orientation.  The text of the statute does not mention sexual orientation, so the interpretive question for the court was whether discriminating against somebody because they are lesbian, gay or bisexual can be considered a form of sex discrimination.

What was particularly amazing about the affirmative decision, the first to rule this way by a federal appeals court, was that the 7th Circuit is composed overwhelmingly of Republican appointees, many of whom were appointed as long ago as the Reagan Administration.  Although the lead opinion for the Circuit was written by Chief Judge Diane Pamela Wood, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, the 8-member majority of the 11-judge bench included more Republicans than Democrats.  Many of the judges in the majority could be generally characterized as judicial conservatives.

Wood’s opinion was joined by Frank Easterbrook (Reagan appointee), Ilana Rovner (George H. W. Bush appointee), Ann Claire Williams (Clinton appointee), and David F. Hamilton (the only Obama appointee on the Circuit). Richard Posner (Reagan appointee) wrote a concurring opinion.  Joel Martin Flaum (Reagan appointee) wrote a concurring opinion which was joined by Kenneth Francis Ripple (Reagan appointee).  The dissent by Diane S. Sykes (George W. Bush appointee) was joined by Michael Stephen Kanne (Reagan appointee) and William Joseph Bauer (Ford appointee).  Ripple and Bauer are senior judges who were sitting on the en banc hearing because they were part of the three-judge panel (with Judge Rovner) that ruled on the case last year.  The Circuit has 11 authorized positions, but there are two vacancies among the active judges, part of the Republican Senate’s legacy of refusing to confirm most of President Obama’s judicial appointees during his second term.

The Circuit’s decision to grant en banc review clearly signaled a desire to reconsider the issue, which Judge Rovner had called for doing in her panel opinion. Rovner then made a persuasive case that changes in the law since the 7th Circuit had previously ruled negatively on the question called out for reconsideration.  Those who attended the oral argument on November 30 or listened to the recording on the court’s website generally agreed that the circuit was likely to overrule its old precedents, the only mystery being who would write the opinion, what theories they would use, and who would dissent.

The lawsuit was filed by Kimberly Hively, a lesbian who was working as an adjunct professor at the college, which is located in South Bend, Indiana. Despite years of successful teaching, her attempts to secure a full-time tenure-track position were continually frustrated and finally her contract was not renewed under circumstances that led her to believe it was because of her sexual orientation.  Since Indiana’s state law does not forbid sexual orientation discrimination, and South Bend’s ordinance (which does forbid sexual orientation discrimination) would not apply to the state college, she filed suit in federal court under Title VII.  She represented herself at that stage.  The trial judge, Rudy Lozano, granted the college’s motion to dismiss the case on the ground that 7th Circuit precedents exclude sexual orientation discrimination claims under Title VII.

Hively obtained representation from Lambda Legal on appeal. The three-judge panel rejected her appeal, while two of the judges urged that the precedents be reconsidered.

Judge Wood found that several key Supreme Court decisions have broadened the meaning of “because of sex” in Title VII, to the extent that she could write that “in the years since 1964, Title VII has been understood to cover far more than the simple decision of an employer not to hire a woman for Job A, or a man for Job B.” The broadening includes launching a complex law of sexual harassment, including same-sex sexual harassment, and discrimination against a person who fails to conform to “a certain set of gender stereotypes.”

As have many of the other judges who have written on this issue, Wood quoted from Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the unanimous court in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., 523 U.S. 75 (1998), the same-sex harassment case, in which, after noting that “male-on-male sexual harassment in the workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it enacted Title VII,” this did not mean that the statute could not be interpreted to apply to such a situation. “But statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils,” Scalia wrote, “and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.”

Woods found convincing Hively’s contention, argued to the court by Lambda Legal’s Greg Nevins, that two alternative theories would support her claim. The first follows a “comparative method in which we attempt to isolate the significance of the plaintiff’s sex to the employer’s decision: has she described a situation in which, holding all other things constant and changing only her sex, she would have been treated the same way?”  The second rests on an intimate association claim, relying on the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling striking down state laws barring interracial marriages, Loving v. Virginia.  The Supreme Court held that a ban on interracial marriage was a form of race discrimination, because the state was taking race in account in deciding whom somebody could marry.  Similarly here, an employer is taking sex into account when discriminating against somebody because they associate intimately with members of the same sex.  After briefly describing these two theories, Wood wrote, “Although the analysis differs somewhat, both avenues end up in the same place: sex discrimination.”

Woods noted at least two rulings by other circuits under Title VII that had adapted Loving’s interracial marriage analysis to an employment setting, finding race discrimination where an employer discriminated against persons who were in interracial relationships, Parr v. Woodmen of the World Life Insurance Co., 791 F.2 888 (11th Cir. 1986), and Holcomb v. Iona College, 521 F.3d 130 (2nd Cir. 2008).  These citations were a bit ironic, since the 11th and 2nd Circuits have in recent weeks rejected sexual orientation discrimination claims under Title VII, in which the plaintiffs advanced the same analogy to support their Title VII claims.  These recent opinions were by three-judge panels that held themselves to be bound by prior circuit rulings.  Lambda Legal has already filed a petition for en banc review in the 11th Circuit case, and counsel for plaintiff in the 2nd Circuit case is thinking about doing the same.

Ultimately, Wood acknowledged, “It would require considerable calisthenics to remove the ‘sex’ from ‘sexual orientation.’ The effort to do so has led to confusing and contradictory results, as our panel opinion illustrated so well.  The EEOC concluded, in its Baldwin decision, that such an effort cannot be reconciled with the straightforward language of Title VII.  Many district courts have come to the same conclusion.  Many other courts have found that gender identity claims are cognizable under Title VII.”

Woods recited the now well-worn argument about how it is a basic inconsistency in the law that a person can enter into a same-sex marriage on Saturday and then be fired without legal recourse for having done so when they show up at the workplace on Monday. That is still the state of the law in a majority of the states.

Wood acknowledged that this decision does not end the case. Because Hively’s original complaint was dismissed by the district court without a trial, she has not yet been put to the test of proving that her sexual orientation was a motivating factor in the college’s decision not to hire her or renew her adjunct contract.  And, what passed unspoken, the college might decide to petition the Supreme Court to review this ruling, although the immediate reaction of a college spokesperson was that the school – which has its own sexual orientation non-discrimination policy – denies that it discriminated against Hively, and is ready to take its chances at trial.

Judge Posner submitted a rather odd concurring opinion, perhaps reflecting the oddity of some of his comments during oral argument, including the stunning question posed to the college’s lawyer: “Why are there lesbians?” Posner, appointed by Reagan as an economic conservative and social libertarian, has evolved into a forceful advocate for LGBT rights, having satisfied himself that genetics and biology play a large part in determining sexual identity and that it is basically unfair to discriminate against LGBT people without justification.  He wrote the Circuit’s decision striking down bans on same-sex marriage in Indiana and Wisconsin in 2014.

In this opinion, he takes on the contention that it is improper for the court to purport to “interpret” the language adopted by Congress in 1964 to cover sexual orientation discrimination. After reviewing various models of statutory interpretation, he insisted that “interpretation can mean giving a fresh meaning to a statement (which can be a statement found in a constitutional or statutory text) – a meaning that infuses the statement with vitality and significance today.”  He used as his prime example judicial interpretation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, adopted “long before there was a sophisticated understanding of the economics of monopoly and competition.”  As a result of changing times and new knowledge, he observed, “for more than thirty years the Act has been interpreted in conformity to the modern, not the nineteenth-century, understanding of the relevant economics.” Basically, the courts have “updated” the Act in order to keep it relevant to the present.

He argued that the same approach should be brought to interpreting Title VII, adopted more than half a century ago. This old law “invites an interpretation that will update it to the present, a present that differs markedly from the era in which the Act was enacted.”  And, after reviewing the revolution in understanding of human sexuality and public opinion about it, he concluded it was time to update Title VII to cover sexual orientation claims, even though “it is well-nigh certain that homosexuality, male or female, did not figure in the minds of the legislators who enacted Title VII.”  Although some of the history he then recites might arouse some quibbles, he was able to summon some pointed examples of Justice Scalia employing this method in his interpretation of the Constitution regarding, for example, flag-burning and an individual right to bear arms.

“Nothing has changed more in the decades since the enactment of the statute than attitudes toward sex,” wrote Posner, going on to recite the litigation history of the struggle for marriage equality that culminated in 2015 with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Although it might sound odd at times as a judicial opinion, Posner’s concurrence is eminently readable and packed full of interesting information, including his list of “homosexual men and women (and also bisexuals, defined as having both homosexual and heterosexual orientations)” who have made “many outstanding intellectual and cultural contributions to society (think for example of Tchaikovsky, Oscar Wilde, Jane Addams, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Marlene Dietrich, Bayard Rustin, Alan Turing, Alec Guinness, Leonard Bernstein, Van Cliburn, and James Baldwin – a very partial list).”

This brought to the writer’s mind a famous paragraph in Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion rejecting a challenge to the traditional anti-trust exemption for professional baseball, in which Blackmun included his own list of the greatest professional baseball players in history (compiled through a survey of the Supreme Court’s members and their young legal clerks).

Instead of pursuing Judge Wood’s line of reasoning, Posner was ready to declare that sexual orientation discrimination is a form of sex discrimination without such detailed analysis. “The most tenable and straightforward ground for deciding in favor of Hively is that while in 1964 sex discrimination meant discrimination against men or women as such and not against subsets of men or women such as effeminate men or mannish women, the concept of sex discrimination has since broadened in light of the recognition, which barely existed in 1964, that there are significant numbers of both men and women who have a sexual orientation that sets them apart from the heterosexual members of their genetic sex (male or female), and that while they constitute a minority their sexual orientation is not evil and does not threaten society.  Title VII in terms forbids only sex discrimination, but we now understand discrimination against homosexual men and women to be a form of sex discrimination; and to paraphrase [Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.], ‘We must consider what this country has become in deciding what that [statute] has reserved.’”

In his concurring opinion Judge Flaum took a narrower approach, noting that Title VII was amended in 1991 to provide that “an unlawful employment practice is established when the complaining party demonstrates that … sex … was a motivating factor for any employment practice, even though other factors also motivated the practice.” In other words, discrimination does not have to be “solely” because of sex to violate Title VII.  It is enough if the individual’s sex was part of the reason for the discrimination.  In light of this, Flaum (and Ripple, who joined his opinion) would look to the analogy with discrimination against employees in interracial relationships.  In addition, he noted, “One cannot consider a person’s homosexuality without also accounting for their sex: doing so would render ‘same’ and ‘own’ meaningless” in dictionary definitions that define homosexuality in terms of  whether somebody is attracted to persons of “the same” or “their own” sex.  Clearly, “sex” is involved when people are discriminated against because they are gay.

Judge Sykes’s dissent channeled scores of cases going back to the early years of Title VII and argued against the method of statutory interpretation used by the various opinions making up the majority. “The question before the en banc court is one of statutory interpretation,” she wrote.  “The majority deploys a judge-empowering, common-law decision method that leaves a great deal of room for judicial discretion.  So does Judge Posner in his concurrence.  Neither is faithful to the statutory text, read fairly, as a reasonable person would have understood it when it was adopted.  The result is a statutory amendment courtesy of unelected judges.  Judge Posner admits this; he embraces and argues for this conception of judicial power.  The majority does not, preferring instead to smuggle in the statutory amendment under cover of an aggressive reading of loosely related Supreme Court precedents.  Either way, the result is the same: the circumvention of the legislative process by which the people govern themselves.”

Although Sykes conceded that sexual orientation discrimination is wrong, she was not ready to concede that one could find it illegal by interpretation of a 1964 statute prohibiting sex discrimination at a time when the legislature could not possibly have been intending to ban discrimination against LGBT people. As Posner pointed out, that issue wasn’t on the radar in 1964.  Thus, to Sykes, Bauer and Kanne, it was not legitimate for a court to read this into the statute under the guise of “interpretation.”

Speculating about the ultimate fate of this decision could go endlessly on. There are fierce debates within the judiciary about acceptable methods of interpreting statutes, and various theories about how to deal with aging statutes that are out of sync with modern understandings.

Posner’s argument for judicial updating allows for the possibility that if Congress disagrees with what a court has done, it can step in and amend the statute, as Congress has frequently amended Title VII to overrule Supreme Court interpretations with which it disagreed. (For example, Congress overruled the Supreme Court’s decision that discrimination against pregnant women was not sex discrimination in violation of Title VII.)  Posner’s approach will be familiar to those who have read the influential 1982 book by then-Professor (now 2nd Circuit Judge) Guido Calabresi, “A Common Law for the Age of Statutes,” suggesting that courts deal with the problem of ancient statutes and legislative inertia by “updating” statutes through interpretation to deal with contemporary problems, leaving it to the legislature to overrule the courts if they disagree.  This method is more generally accepted in other common law countries (British Commonwealth nations), such as Australia, South Africa, India and Canada, than in the United States, but it clearly appeals to Posner as eminently practical.

So far the Republican majorities in Congress have not been motivated to address this issue through amendments to Title VII, or to advance the Equality Act, introduced during Obama’s second term, which would amend all federal sex discrimination laws to address sexual orientation and gender identity explicitly. Perhaps they will be provoked to act, however, if the question gets up to the Supreme Court and the 7th Circuit’s view prevails.

With the possibility of appeals now arising from three different circuits with different views of the issue, Supreme Court consideration of this question is highly likely. Public opinion polls generally show overwhelming support for prohibiting sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in the workplace, which might serve as a brake on conservative legislators who would otherwise respond adversely to a Supreme Court ruling approving the 7th Circuit’s holding.

Denial of Refuge to Jamaican Who Claims to Be Bisexual Sparks Disagreement on 7th Circuit Panel

Posted on: August 21st, 2016 by Art Leonard No Comments

By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit affirmed a decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) to deny relief under the Convention Against Torture to a Jamaican man who claims to be bisexual.  [Petitioner] v. Lynch, 2016 WL 4376516, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 15127 (August 17, 2016).  The majority of the panel, in an opinion by Judge Diane Pamela Wood, found that under the deferential standard for reviewing administrative decisions in the immigration system, the evidentiary record that led the Immigration Judge to conclude that the petitioner had failed to prove he was bisexual did not compel a contrary conclusion and so could not be overturned.

Dissenting, Judge Richard Posner contended that the Immigration Judge had “fastened on what are unquestionable, but trivial and indeed irrelevant, mistakes or falsehoods in [petitioner’s] testimony,” and, furthermore, “The weakest part of the immigration judge’s opinion is its conclusion that [petitioner] is not bisexual, a conclusion premised on the fact that he’s had sexual relations with women (including a marriage). Apparently the immigration judge does not know the meaning of bisexual.  The fact that he refused even to believe there is hostility to bisexuals in Jamaica suggests a closed mind and gravely undermines his critical finding that [petitioner] is not bisexual.”

According to Judge Wood’s decision summarizing the record in the case, the petitioner, who was born and grew up in Jamaica, claims to have begun having sex with both men and women while a teenager. He fell in love with an American woman visiting Jamaica and they married and moved to the U.S., where she sponsored him for resident status.  However, the marriage didn’t last and their failure to attend a required interview with immigration officials resulted in termination of his status, after which they divorced.  Around the same time, he pled guilty to an attempted criminal sexual assault charge, was sentenced to probation, violated his probation and was resentenced to prison time.  After his release from prison, he was swooped up by Homeland Security and processed for deportation.  In the course of those proceedings, he raised the horrendous conditions for gay and bi people in Jamaica, seeking protection under the Convention Against Torture (CAT).

The Immigration Judge concluded that his criminal record prevented granting him withholding of removal, and most of the attention in the case focused on the CAT claim. A person who is otherwise deportable may win relief under the CAT by showing that they would likely be subjected to torture or serious harm at the hands of the government or those the government is unable to control.  While numerous sources, including State Department Human Rights reports from 2012 and 2013, document the fierce homophobia in Jamaica and the failure of the government to address it effectively, the BIA continues to dither about whether LGBT refugees from Jamaica are entitled to CAT relief.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit recently remanded another Jamaican case to the BIA for reconsideration in light of this information.

In this case, the IJ, following the BIA line, rejected the claim, but most of the attention was focused on the credibility of petitioner’s claim to be bisexual and that he would be known as such in Jamaica and thus likely to encounter serious harm there. The IJ focused on the numerous inconsistencies in his testimony about his experiences in Jamaica, in which he mixed up dates, places, and names to such an extent that the IJ found his claims to be not credible.  The IJ rejected the submission of letters from various people attesting to his bisexuality (including two letters signed by former boyfriends now living in other states), doubting their validity.

The BIA “found no clear error in the IJ’s findings that [petitioner] ‘did not credibly testify and did not establish that he has ever been bisexual.’,” wrote Judge Wood, “And because [petitioner] had not established that he was bisexual or that he would be perceived in Jamaica as bisexual – the basis of his purported fear of torture – he had not met his burden of proof under the CAT.”

In refusing to upset this ruling, the majority of the 7th Circuit panel focused on its limited authority to review factual findings by an IJ, stating that the question is “whether the facts compel a conclusion contrary to the one that the IJ reached.  While we might wish it were otherwise, there is no exception under which plenary review is available for factual questions of enormous consequence, as this one is for [petitioner].”

“We are not insensible to the fact that immigration judges sometimes make mistakes, and that the costs of such errors can be terrible,” wrote Wood. “A mistaken denial of asylum can be fatal to the person sent back to a country where persecution on account of a protected characteristic occurs; a mistaken denial of deferral of removal under the Torture Convention can have ghastly consequences.  If we could balance the magnitude of the risk times the probability of its occurrence against the cost of offering a few additional procedures, or a few more years in the United States, we would.”

While admitting that this result is harsh, Judge Wood dangled hope that if the petitioner could come up with more credible evidence, he might be able to persuade the IJ to grant a motion to reopen his case.

This did not satisfy Judge Posner, who really ripped into the majority in his dissenting opinion. Posner pointed out that the merits of the petitioner’s claim “depend on how two issues are resolved: whether [petitioner] is bisexual and whether bisexuals are persecuted in Jamaica.  The rejection of the second point by the Immigration Judge, upheld by the Board of Immigration Appeals, is cursory and unconvincing; but if he isn’t bisexual the error is harmless.  But the rejection of his claim to be bisexual is also unconvincing.  The immigration judge emphasized such things as [his] lack of detailed recollection of events that go back as far as 1983 and a supposed lack of ‘proof’ of bisexuality.  Well, even members of this panel have forgotten a lot of 33-year-old details.  And how exactly does one prove that he (or she) is bisexual?  Persuade all one’s male sex partners to testify, to write letters, etc.?  No, because most Jamaican homosexuals are not going to go public with their homosexuality given the vicious Jamaican discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (“LGBT”) persons, which is undeniable….”

Posner recited at some length information easily available on-line and from the State Department, and asserted that the immigration judge’s opinion “is oblivious to these facts.” He pointed out that the court’s opinion “does not explain” how many of the consistencies of testimony “could have any bearing on the question of [his] sexual orientation.”  Posner ripped to shreds the IJ’s rationale for rejecting the various letters offered by the petitioner, including those from his ex-lovers, and criticized the immigration judge for failing to ask a psychologist to provide input on the question.  “Immigration judges are authorized to do this,” he wrote, “authorized to select and consult, which they may and usually do on the phone, an expert with expertise relevant to the case at hand.”

Most tellingly, however, wrote Posner, “Nor had any reason been given, either by the immigration judge or by the majority opinion in this court, why if [petitioner] is not bisexual he would claim to be in an effort to remain in the United States, knowing that if he failed in this effort to remain he would be in grave danger of persecution when having lost his case he was shipped off to Jamaica. No doubt once back in Jamaica he could deny being bisexual – but no one who was either familiar with this litigation, or had been one of his persecutors before he left Jamaica for the United States, would believe (or at least admit to believing) his denial.”

Posner also threw in his insight that “homosexuals are often antipathetic to bisexuals,” for which he cited some articles from the internet. Posner seems to be an avid googler, judging by his on-line references in this and other cases.  “This is not to say that they would be likely to attack [petitioner] physically when he returned to Jamaica, but they might well talk about his return to the island – the return of a bisexual – and some of the persons to whom they talked might well be heterosexual and want to harm [him] physically.  Word is likely to spread quickly in an island of fewer than three million inhabitants.”  Posner’s parting shot, as noted above, was to suggest that the IJ was ignorant about bisexuality and had a “closed mind” on the subject.

At this point, the petitioner, who has been representing himself without a lawyer (and thus, statistically, never had a particularly good chance of winning his case), likely faces imminent deportation. We have withheld his name in this account of the case to avoid spreading it on the internet and exposing him to further potential harm.

7th Circuit Rules Chicago Sheriff Violated First Amendment Rights of Backpage.com by Pressuring Credit Card Companies

Posted on: December 1st, 2015 by Art Leonard No Comments

 Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff Thomas J. Dart violated the 1st Amendment rights of Backpage.com when he sent a letter to the executives of Mastercard and Visa pressuring them to refrain from processing credit card transactions between Backpage and its advertisers, ruled the 7th Circuit on November 30 in a sweeping free speech opinion by Circuit Judge Richard Posner.  Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 20728, 2015 WL 7717221.

Wrote Posner, “The Sheriff of Cook County, Tom Dart, has embarked on a campaign intended to crush Backpage’s adult section – crush Backpage period, it seems – by demanding that firms such as Visa and Mastercard prohibit the use of their credit cards to purchase any ads on Backpage, since the ads might be for illegal sex-related products or services, such as prostitution. Visa and Mastercard bowed to pressure from Sheriff Dart and others by refusing to process transactions in which their credit cards are used to purchase any ads on Backpage, even those that advertise indisputably legal services.”

Dart’s ire is specifically aimed at the “adult” section of Backpage.com, which is “subdivided into escorts, body rubs, strippers and strip clubs, dom[ination] and fetish, ts (transsexual escorts), male escorts, phone [sex], and adult jobs (jobs related to services offered in other adult categories, whether or not the jobs are sexual – not every employee of a brothel is a sex worker).”

District Judge John J. Tharp, Jr., had denied Backpage’s motion for a preliminary injunction against Sheriff Dart, reasoning that he was just exercising his own free speech rights by writing to Visa and Mastercard to express his disgust with the sexually-oriented advertising and alluding to the credit card companies’ potential liability under a federal money-laundering statute.

To Posner and the other members of the panel (Circuit Judges Ripple and Sykes), Dart was doing more than just expressing a personal opinion. “While he has a First Amendment right to express his views about Backpage,” wrote Posner, “a public official who tries to shut down an avenue of expression of ideas and opinions through ‘actual or threatened imposition of government power or sanction’ is violating the First Amendment,” citing American Family Association, Inc. v. San Francisco, 277 F.3d 1114 (9th Circ. 2002).

The 7th Circuit panel saw through Dart’s carefully-worded letter to perceive the implicit threat of a boycott and possible prosecution.  Posner pointed out that if Backpage was engaging in any unlawful activity, Dart could prosecute the organization directly.  Dart had attempted to do that with Craigslist, but was rebuffed by the district court in Dart v. Craigslist, Inc., 665 F.Supp. 2d 961 (N.D. Ill. 2009).  “Craigslist, perhaps anticipating Dart’s campaign against Backpage, shut down its adult section the following year,” Posner observed, “though adult ads can be found elsewhere on its website.  The suit against Craigslist having failed, the sheriff decided to proceed against Backpage not by litigation but instead by suffocation, depriving the company of ad revenues by scaring off its payments-service providers. The analogy is to killing a person by cutting off his oxygen supply rather than by shooting him.  Still, if all the sheriff were doing to crush Backpage was done in his capacity as a private citizen rather than as a government official (and a powerful government official at that), he would be within his rights.  But he is using the power of his office to threaten legal sanctions against the credit-card companies for facilitating future speech, and by doing so he is violating the First Amendment unless there is no constitutionally protected speech in the ads on Backpage’s website – and no one is claiming that.”

“The First Amendment forbids a public official to attempt to suppress the protected speech of private persons by threatening that legal sanctions will at his urging be imposed unless there is compliance with his demands,” Posner asserted. He picked apart Dart’s letter in detail, concluding that it was not a mere expression of Dart’s opinion, but rather was “designed to compel the credit card companies to act by inserting Dart into the discussion; he’ll be chatting them up.”  The credit card companies certainly felt threatened; shortly after receiving the letter, both of them cut off Backpage and informed Dart of their actions, which he hailed at a press conference, with a press release claiming credit for their actions.  Backpage was forced to make its ads free, forfeiting a major source of revenue, which led to this lawsuit.

Posner pointed out that a letter like Dart’s emanating from a private citizen “would be more likely to be discarded or filed away than to be acted on,” noting that the companies had received numerous such letters from private citizens in the past objecting to their facilitating operation of websites such as Backpage and Craigslist.

The court concluded that the credit card companies “were victims of government coercion aimed at shutting up or shutting down Backpage’s adult section (more likely aimed at bankrupting Backpage – lest the ads that the sheriff doesn’t like simply migrate to other sections of the website), when it is unclear that Backpage is engaged in illegal activity, and if it is not then the credit card companies cannot be accomplices and should not be threatened by the sheriff and his staff.”

Posner rejected Dart’s argument that most of the sexually-related advertising on Backpage is illegal. “Fetishism?  Phone sex? Performances by striptease artists?  (Vulgar is not violent.)  One ad in the category ‘dom & fetish’ is for the services of a ‘professional dominatrix’ – a woman who is paid to whip or otherwise humiliate a customer in order to arouse him sexually.  It’s not obvious that such conduct endangers women or children or violates any laws, including laws against prostitution,” wrote Posner.  What is delightful about that paragraph, actually, is Posner’s citation to several on-line reference sources spelling out the activities of professional dominatrices. Indeed, the entire opinion is a delight to read, as Posner’s indignation with the sheriff’s abuse of power shines through the writing.  The opinion is available free on the 7th Circuit’s website.

Backpage.com is represented by James C. Grant of Davis Wright Tremaine (Seattle) and Robert Corn-Revere and Ronald G. London of the same firm’s D.C. office. The court received amicus briefs from Ilya Shapiro on behalf of the Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, Dkt Liberty Project, and Wayne Giampietro on behalf of the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Association of Alternative Newmedia.

7th Circuit Panel Roughs Up State Attorneys in Marriage Equality Arguments

Posted on: August 26th, 2014 by Art Leonard 1 Comment

A panel of three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, based in Chicago, gave a very rough time to attorneys from the states of Indiana and Wisconsin on August 26 during oral arguments about marriage equality appeals from those states.  Three district court rulings from Indiana and one from Wisconsin issued earlier in 2014 had found unconstitutional those states’ refusal to allow same-sex couples to marry or to recognize their marriages contracted in other jurisdictions, and the states had appealed.  Indiana Solicitor General Thomas M. Fisher and Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Timothy C. Samuelson probably anticipated tough questioning from Democratic appointees Ann Claire Williams and David Hamilton, but one suspects they were not anticipating the kind of tough cross-examination they got from Richard Posner, the most senior member of the panel who was appointed to the court by President Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s.

Judge Posner, a father of the law-and-economics movement and a devoted empiricist, actually mocked the arguments he was getting from the state attorneys, but anyone who has been following the trend of marriage equality decisions over the past year might have predicted this result in light of Posner’s record of relentlessly pursuing facts and logic in his decisions.  Posner pressed both attorneys for some reason why neither state would allow or recognize same-sex marriages.  Referring to data showing that about 250,000 children nationwide are living with gay adoptive parents, about 3,000 of whom are in Indiana, he pressed Fisher for a reason why Indiana would deny those children the same rights and security of having married parents that are accorded to the adopted children of married couples, and Fisher could give him no real answer.

Wouldn’t it help those children if their parents could marry, asked Posner?   What’s better for the welfare of these children — that their parents be allowed to marry or prevented from marrying?  Posner’s insistent questions followed up on Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s comment in his opinion for the Court in U.S. v. Windsor about the way denial of marriage to same-sex couples humiliates their children, who are being told by the state that their families are second class and not worthy of marriage.

Fisher insisted, as virtually the sole justification for Indiana’s marriage ban, on a state interest in making marriage available to different-sex couples so that their children would be tied to their biological parents in stable families.  But, having conceded that the state’s interest extended to the families in which children are raised, he could not satisfactorily answer questions from all three judges about how excluding same-sex couples from marriage advanced that interest.  If you let gay people adopt, asked Posner, why not let their children have the same benefits?

Fisher’s response – that same-sex couples can only get children intentionally and don’t need to be “nudged” into marrying – seem puny.  Posner also pointed out the large number of children in foster care who needed adoptive parents and asked whether letting same-sex couples marry would lead to more adoptions.  Fisher disclaimed knowledge about such a result, but Posner, the law-and-economics expert, suggested that it is less expensive for married couples to adopt than for unmarried couples to adopt precisely because of all the benefits that accompany marriage.

Judge Hamilton, seizing upon an argument in Indiana’s brief claiming that the state’s marriage statute did not discriminate based on sexual orientation, seemed to throw Fisher into a panic by suggesting that the state was conceding that its law classified based on sex and was thus subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause.  Virtually all judges seem to agree that if heightened scrutiny is used, bans on same-sex marriage are doomed to fail.

Samuelson did not fare much better arguing for Wisconsin.  He contended that the due process clause was a source of negative rights but not positive rights, and asked the court to consider whether Wisconsin is required to have a marriage law at all.  He suggested that if Wisconsin repealed its marriage law and substituted domestic partnerships, nobody would have cause for complaint because, in his view, the Due Process Clause does not contain an affirmative right to marry.  He argued that all the prior Supreme Court marriage cases were concerned with negative rights, not affirmative rights, in that the Court was striking down instances in which the state had interfered with existing marriage rights.  The judges did not seem impressed by this argument and gave it short shrift.

During Samuelson’s argument on behalf of Wisconsin, Judge Posner really cut to the chase.  As Samuelson blundered on about tradition and “Burkean values” Posner finally asked, “Isn’t this based on hate?” and referred to the history of “savage discrimination” against gay people, including discrimination by government.  Samuelson countered by pointing out that Wisconsin was the first state to pass a statute banning discrimination because of sexual orientation in housing, employment and public accommodations.  Posner responded, “Why draw the line there?”  Why not cease discriminating in marriage?  To Samuelson’s response that this was a matter of “legislative policy,” Posner said, “Give me a rational basis for that legislative policy,” but Samuelson could not.

What did distinguish the 7th Circuit argument from the approaches of the 10th and 4th Circuit courts of appeals, which ruled in marriage equality cases over the summer, was that the judges seemed more inclined from their questioning and comments to treat this as an Equal Protection case rather than a case about a fundamental right to marry.  They pressed the attorneys from plaintiffs — Lambda Legal’s Camilla Taylor, the Indiana ACLU’s Kenneth Falk, and the National ACLU LGBT Rights Project’s James Esseks – for some limiting principle by which to described a constitutional right to marry.  Would that endanger laws forbidding incest, first-cousin marriages, polygamy?  Esseks came back with the strongest answer, pointing to Justice Kennedy’s description of the liberty encompassed by the Due Process Clause in his opinion for the Court in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 decision striking down that state’s homosexual sodomy ban.  Kennedy listed the right to select a marital partner as one of the fundamental rights within the scope of constitutionally-protected liberty, and commented, to the outspoken chagrin of Justice Scalia, that homosexuals had the same liberty interest.  Scalia’s dissent asserted that once the Court had eliminated tradition and moral disapproval as grounds for adverse treatment of gay people, there seemed no basis to deny gay people the right to marry.  His comment has been noted by many of the federal trial judges who have struck down marriage bans in recent months.

Most of the questioning for the plaintiffs’ attorneys focused on how to describe the liberty interest and where to find limiting principles for it.  Hamilton particularly suggested that equal protection provided the stronger argument for plaintiffs, since the discriminatory purpose and effect of the marriage bans was clear.  Esseks made a strong pitch for the court to use heightened scrutiny if it decided the case using an equal protection theory, but the judges seemed unreceptive.  Judge Williams suggested that the concept of “heightened scrutiny” was not helpful.  To her, the issue was whether the challenged laws caused harm, and whether there was some balancing benefit to the state that justified the harm.  Her questioning suggested that she understood the harms very well, but that attorneys for the states were unable to name any concrete benefits associated with these bans.

During Fisher’s brief rebuttal argument, Judge Posner came back to his issue of children of adoptive parents, pushing Fisher again to give a reason for denying them benefits, and asking how the marriage ban could possibly advance the state’s interests.  Do you really believe that you get less extramarital sex by pushing heterosexuals to marry, he asked.  You let all these sterile people marry, he commented.  Are they supposed to be role models for channeling procreation?  He characterized this argument as ridiculous.

Posner asked Fisher whether he read the amicus brief filed by the Family Equality Council, which was devoted to relating the stories of harms incurred by children whose parents were not allowed to marry.  Fisher claimed to have read it but not remembered it.  Posner referred to the “harrowing information” about problems created for children raised by couples forbidden to marry, the misfortunes they suffered, and asked incredulously whether Fisher was not moved by that.  He also asked whether Fisher had any empirical basis for anything he had said, in a void dripping with sarcasm.

It was hard to imagine that either of the appellant states are going to win even one vote from this panel, if the judges vote along the lines suggested by their questions and comments during the oral argument.