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Michigan Claims Court Issues Split Ruling on State’s Public Accommodations Law

Posted on: December 13th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

Michigan Court of Claims Judge Christopher M. Murray issued an opinion on December 7 in Rouch World v. Michigan Department of Civil Rights, Court of Claims Case No. 20-000145-MZ, holding that the state’s Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act (ELCRA), which, among other things, prohibits businesses from discriminating against customers because of their sex, cannot be interpreted by his court as banning sexual orientation discrimination, because the state’s Court of Appeals rejected the argument that sexual orientation discrimination is covered by the Act in a 1993 ruling.

On the other hand, finding that there is no Michigan court ruling on whether the ELCRA’s sex discrimination ban can be applied to discrimination against transgender people, Judge Murray followed the Supreme Court’s June 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, 140 S. Ct. 1731, which interpreted the federal ban on sex discrimination in employment to apply to claims of discrimination based on transgender status.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced that she would appeal Murray’s ruling as to sexual orientation discrimination, while the business that faces a gender identity discrimination claim announced that it would appeal that ruling.

Murray’s opinion concerned discrimination claims against two businesses.  Rouch World, an events venue that rents space for weddings and other celebrations, refused to book an event for a same-sex couple, citing the owners’ religious objections to same-sex marriages.  Uprooted Electrolysis, which provides permanent hair-removal treatment, turned down a transgender person seeking their service as part of her transition, also citing religious objections.

In both cases, the rejected customers filed complaints with MDCR, which began investigations pursuant to its Interpretative Statement 2018-1, which states that the ELCRA can be interpreted to cover such claims.  In both cases, the businesses subsequently filed suit in the Court of Claims, arguing that the Department does not have jurisdiction over sexual orientation and gender identity claims, and even if it did, that their religious objections privileged them to deny the services.  The plaintiffs asked the court to put an end to the investigations.

Judge Murray explained that the ELCRA does not define the word “sex” as used in the provision applicable to claims of discrimination by “a place of public accommodation,” which includes businesses selling goods or services to the public.  In 1993, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled in Barbour v. Department of Social Services, 497 N.W. 2d 216, that “harassment or discrimination based on a person’s sexual orientation is not an activity proscribed by the Act.”  That decision is binding on trial courts in Michigan.  Judge Murray explained that “whether Barbour’s reasoning is no longer valid in light of Bostock v. Clayton County, and cases containing similar reasoning, is a matter for the Court of Appeals, not this court.”  Consequently, Attorney General Nessel, herself an out lesbian who helped persuade the Department to issue Interpretative Statement 2018-1, will appeal this part of the ruling to the Court of Appeals.

On the other hand, Murray found no prior opinion by a Michigan court addressing the question of whether gender identity discrimination claims are covered by the ELCRA.  Lacking such authority, Michigan courts will look to decisions concerning other statutes with similar language as well as federal rulings for interpretative guidance.  This brings the Bostock decision into play.

Significantly, the Michigan Supreme Court recently vacated a Michigan Court of Appeals ruling in a case under the ethnic intimidation statute for reconsideration in light of Bostock.  In that case, People v. Rogers, 331 Mich. App. 12, vacated, 950 N.W. 2d 48 (2020), the Court of Appeals ruled that the ethnic intimidation statute’s listing of sex does not cover hate crimes against transgender people.  The Michigan Supreme Court told the Court of Appeals to reconsider that ruling in light of Bostock, a clear signal that the Michigan court is prepared to treat the Bostock decision as a persuasive precedent for interpreting the state’s sex discrimination laws.

“Following the Bostock Court’s rationale,” wrote Murray, “if defendants determine that a  person treated someone who ‘identifies’ with a gender different than the gender that he or she was born as, then that is dissimilar treatment on the basis of sex, and they are entitled to redress that violation through the existing MDCR procedures.  Nothing in the ELCRA would preclude that action.”

The bottom line of Judge Murray’s decision is that the Department does not have jurisdiction of the sexual orientation discrimination claim against Rouch World unless the Michigan Court of Appeals decides to overrule its old Barbour decision, but that the Department does have jurisdiction to investigate Uprooted Electrolysis’s denial of service to a transgender client, at least so far as interpretation of the ELCRA goes.  Of course, the Supreme Court’s remand in the ethnic intimidation case is likely to persuade the Court of Appeals that it should also reconsider Barbour in light of Bostock.

The court refrained from ruling on the religious exemption claims, stating that issue “has not been sufficiently briefed to resolve at this juncture.”  The question of federal constitutional religious exemptions from compliance with state or local anti-discrimination laws is now before the U.S. Supreme Court in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, which was argued on November 4 and will be decided sometime in 2021.  It is likely that many state agencies and courts dealing with religious exemption claims by civil rights defendants may delay ruling on such claims until the Supreme Court rules in Fulton.

Judge Murray ended his opinion by stating, “This is not a final order as it does not resolve all of the pending issues in this case.”  This cryptic remark implies that Uprooted Electrolysis may not immediately appeal the court’s determination that the ELCRA applies to the transgender discrimination claim, since its religious exemption claim has not yet been ruled upon.  However, the declaration that the MDCR does not have jurisdiction over the sexual orientation claim against Rouch World seems final as to that complaint, so Attorney General Nessel may be able to appeal that ruling.

Federal Court Blocks Trump Regulation Revoking Health Care Protections for Transgender People

Posted on: August 18th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

U.S. District Judge Frederic Block ruled on August 17 that a new Trump Administration Rule that rescinded the Obama Administration’s Rule prohibiting gender identity discrimination in health care will not go into effect on August 18, its scheduled date, and he granted a preliminary injunction against the new Rule’s enforcement.  Judge Block sits in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in Brooklyn. Walker v. Azar, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 148141.

After President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law in 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decided to adopt a rule providing an official interpretation of the non-discrimination requirements contained in Section 1557 of that statute.  Section 1557 incorporates by reference a provision of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which forbids discrimination because of sex in educational institutions that get federal funding.  In the past, HHS and federal courts have looked to decisions interpreting the sex discrimination provision in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans sex discrimination in employment, in interpreting Title IX.

By the time HHS had finished writing its rule in 2016, both the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and several federal appeals courts had interpreted Title VII to ban discrimination because of an individual’s gender identity.  The Obama Administration followed these precedents and included a prohibition on gender identity discrimination in its ACA rule.  Several states and a religious health care institution then joined together to challenge the rule before a federal district judge in Fort Worth, Texas, who was notoriously receptive to issuing nationwide injunctions against Obama Administration policies, and the court was true to that practice, holding that the inclusion of gender identity was contrary to the “original meaning” of the term “because of sex” when it was adopted by Congress in Title IX back in 1972.  The case is Franciscan Alliance, Inc. v. Burwell, 227 F. Supp. 3d 660 (N.D. Tex. 2016).

The new Trump Administration rule that was challenged in the August 17 ruling was intended by the Department of Health and Human Services to codify the decision by district court in Franciscan Alliance.  Franciscan Alliance was issued in December 2016, just weeks before the Trump Administration took office.  Had Hillary Clinton been elected president, the incoming administration would likely have appealed the Fort Worth decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. But the Trump Administration informed the district court that it was not appealing and instead would not enforce the Obama Administration rule and would eventually replace it.

Judge Block emphasized this history as he set out his reasons for finding that Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and its volunteer attorneys from Baker & Hostetler LLP, were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the Trump Rule was both inconsistent with the ACA, and that HHS was “arbitrary and capricious” in adopting this new Rule and publishing it just days after the Supreme Court had ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that discrimination against a person because of their transgender status was “necessarily discrimination because of sex.”

The Supreme Court had heard oral arguments in the Bostock case, which concerned the interpretation of Title VII, on October 8, 2019, while HHS was working on its proposed new rule.  The HHS attorneys knew that the Supreme Court would be issuing a decision by the end of its term, most likely in June 2020.  One of the three cases consolidated in Bostock involved a gender identity discrimination claim by Aimee Stephens against Harris Funeral Homes. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) had sued the employer on Stephens’ behalf.  The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Harris Funeral Homes violated Title VII by discharging Stephens for transitioning, and the Supreme Court granted review on the specific question whether discrimination because of transgender status violates Title VII.  HHS concedes in the “preamble” of its new rule that interpretations of Title IX (and thus Section 1157) generally follow interpretations of Title VII.

October 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memorandum to the Executive Branch explaining the Trump Administration’s position that bans on sex discrimination in federal law did not extend to claims of discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity.  Thus, although the U.S. Solicitor General normally represents federal agencies such as the EEOC when their decisions are appealed to the Supreme Court, that office actually joined in  arguing on behalf of Harris Funeral Homes, leaving it to the ACLU LGBT Rights Project to represent Aimee Stephens before the Supreme Court.

The Trump Administration was so confident that the Court would rule against Stephens that it decided to go ahead with its new Rule, effectively revoking the Obama Administration’s Rule, although the “preamble” did acknowledge that a decision by the Supreme Court in the Title VII case could affect the interpretation of Section 1557.  LGBTQ rights advocates waited impatiently for a ruling in the Bostock case as the Court began to wind up its Term in June.  The Trump Administration was no more patient, announcing its new Rule a few days before the Supreme Court announced its decision in Bostock, apparently assuming that the Court would rule against Stephens.  Without publicly reacting to the Supreme Court’s opinion, or even revising its new Rule to acknowledge that the Trump Administration’s interpretation of “discrimination because of sex” had been rejected by the Supreme Court (in an opinion by Trump’s first appointee to the Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch), HHS went ahead and published the new Rule five days later.

Over the following weeks, challenges to the new Rule were filed in four different federal courts.  HRC filed suit on behalf of two transgender women who had encountered discrimination from health care institutions covered by the ACA.  Judge Block found that their experiences gave them formal standing to challenge the new Rule. Judge Block reached his decision the day before the new Rule was to go into effect.

He found that the well established practice of following Title VII interpretations in sex discrimination cases was likely to be followed under the ACA, just as it was under Title IX, and thus the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their claim that the new Rule was inconsistent with  the statute.  He noted that just two weeks earlier, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had followed the Bostock decision in finding that a Florida school district violated Title IX by denying appropriate restroom access to a transgender student.

Furthermore, the failure of the new rule, published after the Bostock decision, to mention that ruling or to offer any reasoned explanation why it should not be followed, was likely to be found to be “arbitrary and capricious,” so the adoption of the new Rule probably violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the federal law that details how federal agencies are to proceed in adopting new rules and regulations or rescinding old ones.

Because of the December 2016 ruling in Franciscan Alliance and the subsequent non-enforcement policy by the Trump Administration, the Obama Administration’s Rule has not been enforced by HHS since December 2016.  But the ACA allows individuals who suffer discrimination to sue on  their own behalf to enforce the statute, and there have been numerous lawsuits under Section 1557 successfully challenging exclusion of transgender health care from coverage under health insurance policies that are subject to the ACA.

Judge Block’s stay of the effective date and injunction against enforcing the new Rule gives the green light to HHS to resume enforcing Section 1557 in gender identity discrimination cases consistent with the Bostock ruling.  While there are probably plenty of career agency officials in the HHS Office of Civil Rights who would like to do so, any significant effort in that direction seems unlikely so long as Trump remains in office.  For now, the main impact of Judge Block’s order will be to clear a potential obstacle for transgender litigants under Section 1557, as the opinion persuasively explains how Justice Gorsuch’s reasoning in Bostock compels protecting transgender health care patients under the ACA.

The  practical effect of Judge Block’s ruling now is to place the burden on HHS if it wants to  continue defending its new Rule.  HHS must provide a reasoned explanation to the Court about why the Bostock interpretation of “discrimination because of sex” should not be followed under Section 1557.  The simplest way for HHS to proceed consistent with the court’s order would be to strike those portions of the preamble discussing this subject, and to substitute a simple statement that Section 1557’s ban on discrimination because of sex includes claims of discrimination because of sexual orientation  or gender identity consistent with  the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of similar statutory language in the Bostock case.

Botswana High Court Declares Sodomy Law Unconstitutional

Posted on: June 14th, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

The High Court of Botswana ruled on June 11 that three provisions of the country’s Penal Code that collectively make soliciting or participating in gay sex a crime violate several provisions of the Constitution.  The 2.4-million person republic, a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations, is centrally situated north of the border with South Africa.  Formerly known as the British “protectorate” of Bechuanaland, it achieved independent rule in 1965 and formally became the Republic of Botswana in 1966, adopting a Constitution with broad protection for human rights.

The Government has the right to appeal the High Court ruling to the Court of Appeal, a constitutional court whose membership consists mainly of judges from other British Commonwealth countries.  However, there were no immediate press reports about the intention of the Government to appeal, and last year, President Mokgweetsi Masisi delivered a speech “publicly signaling his support for same-sex relations” and arguing that LGBTQ citizens “deserved to have their rights respected,” according to a “Country Report” by The Economist Intelligence Unit published on-line on June 13, discussing the ruling.

The case challenging the constitutionality of the gay sex ban did not arise out of a prosecution.  Rather, a courageous individual, Letsweletse Motshdiemang, represented by three local attorneys, filed an application in the High Court seeking a declaration of the invalidity of law, arguing that it violated his constitutional rights.  According to the court’s opinion by Judge Michael Leburu, the Applicant is a 24-year-old student at the University of Botswana who identifies as “homosexual.”

Leburu’s opinion, describing the Applicant’s life, stated: “He does not know why he likes men and does not know why he is different from other men who love women.  He has accepted to live with that condition and it has become his identity.  Currently, he is in a sexually intimate relationship with a man.” Since the criminal laws authorize up to seven years in prison for gay sex, filing an explicit account of his developing sexual identity was very courageous on the Applicant’s part.  Throughout the litigation he was referred to by his initials as L.M., but the court’s June 11 decision names him in full, in recognition of the liberation the opinion brings for LGBTQ Batswana.  (“Batswana” is the term for citizens of the country.)

After the Applicant filed his lawsuit, Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals of Botswana, the nation’s LGBTQ rights organization usually referred to as LEGABIBO, was allowed to participate as amicus curiae (friend of the court) and supplied expert testimony in support of the lawsuit.

The court’s holding is well summarized by Judge Leburu in a few introductory sentences to the very lengthy opinion.  “Sections 164(a) and (c) and 165 of the Penal Code proscribe and criminalize sexual intercourse and/or attempt thereof between persons of the same sex and/or gender,” he wrote.  “Section 167 proscribes both public and private gross indecency.  What regulatory joy and solace is derived by the law, when it proscribes and criminalizes such conduct of two consenting adults, expressing and professing love to each other, within their secluded sphere, bedroom, confines and/or precinct?  Is this not a question of over-regulation of human conduct and expression, which has a tendency and effect of impairing and infringing upon constitutionally ordained, promised and entrenched fundamental human rights?  Our bill of rights, as entrenched and enshrined in our Supreme Law (the Constitution), is a manifestum of progressive, long lasting and enduring rights, which yearn for judicial recognition and protection.  Any limitation, in the enjoyment of such rights, therefore, ought to be reasonably justifiable within our hallowed democratic dispensation that subscribes to the rule of law, which recognizes and protects both the majority and minority rights and interests.”

A potential roadblock to victory in the case was a 2003 decision by the Court of Appeal, Kanane v. The State, which involved an actual prosecution of a gay man who appealed his conviction.  At that time, the Court of Appeal expressed the view that the country was not ready to accept homosexuality.  The new decision rejects Kanane, largely on the ground of changing public opinion and a variety of new constitutional arguments that had not been presented to the court in the older case.

Judge Leburu’s opinion emphasizes that the challenged laws were not of African origin, but rather were imported by the British during their administration of Bechuanaland, and were merely carried forward into the Botswana Penal Code during the 1960s as part of a general absorption of existing colonial law.  He also explained that the British laws were “traceable to the Bible,” recounting the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and its traditional interpretation “during the Middle Ages” as a condemnation of gay sex, as amplified in certain New Testament passages.  “Within the British Empire,” he wrote, “same sex activity was prohibited as it was deemed morally unacceptable to the British rulers.  In the incorporation of the offence of sodomy in the colonies, such was not preceded by any consultation with the local populace.”

Judge Leburu noted subsequent developments in Britain, culminating with the parliamentary committee headed by Lord Wolfenden, whose report recommending decriminalization was approved in the 1967 Sexual Offenses Act “which decriminalized same sex sexual intercourse,” noting the spread of decriminalization, either through legislation or judicial action, in countries which had at one time been British colonies, including South Africa and the United States.

“The repeal of the sodomy laws was greatly influenced, in large measure, by the inherent recognition of such laws as being discriminatory, invasive of personal dignity, privacy, autonomy, liberty and lastly, the absence of compelling public interest to intrude and regulate private sexual expression and intimacy between consenting adults,” wrote Leburu.

One defining characteristic of judicial decisions of major importance in British Commonwealth countries is the practice of extensive quotation from court opinions of other Commonwealth nations, and Leburu’s opinion is strewn with such quotations, including from the recent Supreme Court of India ruling striking down that nation’s sodomy law, which had also been imposed originally during British colonial rule.  The opinion also refers to the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state sodomy sodomy laws in 2003, as well as rulings from South Africa and Canada.

The opinion decisively rejects narrow, literalistic constitutional interpretation, instead embracing the court’s role in developing constitutional interpretation for changing times.  “In construing the Constitution,” Leburu wrote, “I will accord and give meaning and interpretation which would render it effective.  The Constitution should thus be given a generous construction, which will not unjustifiably erode civil liberties.  A Constitution ought to be interpreted according to the imperatives of the prevailing socio and political context.”  He also insisted that the courts should “have regard to any relevant international treaty, agreement or convention,” and listed several that have been invoked by other courts in cases invalidating sodomy laws.

At the outset of his analysis, he rejected the Applicant’s argument that the statues were “void for vagueness,” as judicial interpretation over time had made clear which acts were prohibited.  However, on every other contention, he found that the Applicant had the better argument than the Government, finding valid claims under the right to privacy (which is explicitly protected in the Botswana Constitution) and constitutional guarantees of liberty, equality and dignity.  He referred to these guarantees as a “triumvirate” that “forms the core values of our fundamental rights, as tabulated and entrenched in Section 3 of the Constitution.”  He explained how the challenged laws violate each of these basic concepts.

In a phrase that was widely quoted in news reports about the opinion, Leburu wrote, “Sexual orientation is innate to a human being.  It is not a fashion statement or posture.  It is an important attribute of one’s personality and identity; hence all and sundry are entitled to complete autonomy over the most intimate decisions relating to personal life, including the choice of a partner.  The right to liberty therefore encompasses the right to sexual autonomy.”  His reference for this statement is to a South African Law Journal article from 1993 by Edwin Cameron, an out gay man who has served as a judge on South Africa’s Constitutional Court.  The opinion also quotes from writings of Michael Kirby, an out gay man who has served on Australia’s Supreme Court and also on Botswana’s Court of Appeal.

“By parity of reasoning and logic,” wrote Leburu, “the Applicant’s sexual orientation lies at the heart of his fundamental right to dignity.  It is his way of expressing his sexual feelings, by the only mode available to him. His dignity ought to be respected, unless lawfully restricted.”

Turning to the issue of discrimination, Leburu rejected the government’s argument that because the law was gender neutral and prohibited everybody from engaging in anal sex – the traditional interpretation of the “unnatural acts” language used in British colonial-era sodomy laws – it was not discriminatory.  Referring to arguments presented by LEGABIBO as amicus, Leburu wrote that “the nub and substance of the amicus case is that the provisions are discriminatory in effect, by denying him sexual expression and gratification, in the only way available to him, even if that way is denied to all.”  Heterosexuals have a legal sexual outlet, while homosexuals do not.

“It was further submitted,” he wrote, “that the word ‘sex’ in Section 3 of the Constitution should be generously and purposively interpreted to include ‘sexual orientation.’  On the basis of the formulated rules of constitutional construction or interpretation, I have no qualms whatsoever in determining that the word ‘sex’ in Section 3 thereof is generously wide enough to include and capture ‘sexual orientation,’ as I hereby determine.”  He referred to an earlier Court of Appeal ruling stating that the “enumerated grounds of discrimination” in the Constitution, which include “sex,” were “not hermetically sealed nor cast in stone.” This was because the framers of the Constitution intended to protect “all potentially vulnerable groups and classes, who would be affected for all time by discriminatory treatment.”  That earlier decision set out a view of living constitutionalism, contrary to “static” constitutional meaning championed in the United States by Justice Clarence Thomas and the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Furthermore, he wrote, “To buttress and fortify this amplification and expansion of the word ‘sex,’ our Parliament has, in its graceful and usual wisdom, recognized that there may be discrimination, at the workplace, on account of sexual orientation, as shown by the Employment (Amendment) Act No. 10 of 2010, which amendment made it unlawful to terminate employment on the grounds of, inter alia, sexual orientation and gender, per Section 23(d).”  Thus, ironically, Botswana made it illegal to discriminate because of sexual orientation nine years ago, without repealing the laws against gay sex.

“The two forms of discrimination — namely sex and sexual orientation — are associable signifiers of a similar scope and content,” he continued.  “The constitutional discrimination, based on sex, is of wider scope and application, where discrimination based on sexual orientation, in the Employment (Amendment) Act, is of a narrower campus.  ‘Sexual orientation’ is thus subset or component of ‘sex.’”  He cited a United Nations Human Rights Committee ruling condemning the sodomy law in the Australian state of Tasmania to support this point, ruling under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which, Leburu observed, Botswana had ratified in 2000.  And, he accepted the argument that the facially neutral laws are discriminatory in effect, and thus unconstitutional since unjustified by the Government.

Referring to the Government’s arguments, he wrote, “There is no scintilla or iota of justification, advanced for the derogation [of rights] in question  The only answer placed at the fore is that the impugned sections are not discriminatory, but, a contrario, this court has found otherwise.  The Respondent’s semblance of justification, can best be described as bare assertions and/or speculations that sexual anal penetration is contrary to public morality or public interest,” but such was not sufficient to justify violating a fundamental right.

Leburu then examined the morality argument in the absence of expert testimony from the Government.  “Even if the Respondent’s public interest or morality justification was to be subject to the criterion of ‘reasonable and justifiable in an open democratic society,’” he wrote, “such justification does not pass constitutional muster. The test of what is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society, is an objective one.  There is nothing reasonable and justifiable by discriminating against fellow members of our diversified society.  The State has failed to single out the objective that is intended to be satisfied by the impugned provisions.”

Furthermore, he noted that maintaining these laws was inconsistent with goals that had been identified in a nation-building exercise, called Botswana National Vision 2016, which included to be “A Compassionate, Just and Caring Nation,” and aspiring to be “an Open, Democratic and Accountable Nation” and “A Moral and Tolerant Nation.”  “To discriminate against another segment of our society pollutes compassion,” he insisted.  “A democratic nation is one that embraces plurality, diversity, tolerance and open-mindedness.  Democracy itself functions, so long as the differences between groups do not impair a broad substrate of shared values.  Our shared values are as contained in our National Vision.  Furthermore, the task of laws is to bring about the maximum happiness of each individual, for the happiness of each will translate into happiness for all.”

The opinion continues in this vein of somewhat high-flown rhetoric for several pages, concluding that the unnatural sex provisions should be stricken, and that the gross indecency provision (which had customarily been used to punish people for engaging in oral sex) should be limited to public acts, the word “private” to be stricken from the provision.  The court also ordered that the Government pay the Applicant’s costs of the litigation.

The courtroom in Gabarone, the nation’s capital, was crowded with LGBTQ activists when the opinion was announced by Judge Leburu, leading to an exuberant celebration.  Among those congratulating Botswana was the United States Department of State.  According to a June 13 report by Agence France Presse English Wire, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, using the preferred method of governmental communication during the Trump Administration, tweeted: “We are pleased by #Botswana’s High Court decision to decriminalize same-sex relationships – an historic moment in protecting human rights for all.  Congrats to the brave people who worked for this outcome.  We hope other countries follow Botswana’s example.”

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 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal, 723 Fed. Appx. 964 (11th Cir., May 10, 2018), petition for en banc review denied, 894 F.3d 1335 (11th 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 2nd 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 2nd 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 (2nd Cir., Feb. 26, 2018). This overruled numerous earlier 2nd 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 6th 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 (6th Cir., March 7, 2018).  The 6th 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 6th 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 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017 in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, 853 F.3d 339 (7th Cir. en banc), a case that the losing employer did not appeal to the Supreme Court.  In 2018, the 2nd Circuit endorsed the EEOC’s view in the Zarda case.

During the oral argument of Zarda in the 2nd 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 6th 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.

 

 

 

 

Federal Government Asks the Supreme Court to Delay Deciding Whether Title VII Bars Gender Identity Discrimination

Posted on: October 31st, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

The Trump Administration has asked the Supreme Court to hold off for now on deciding whether gender identity discrimination is covered under the ban on employment discrimination “because of sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco and several other Justice Department attorneys are listed on a brief filed with the Court on October 24, ostensibly on behalf of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), arguing that the Court should not now grant review of a decision by the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled earlier this year that Harris Funeral Homes violated Title VII by discharging Aimee Stephens, a transgender employee, who was transitioning and sought to comply with the employer’s dress code for female employees. The proprietor of the funeral home objected on religious grounds to having an employee whom he regards as a man dressing as a woman at work. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, No. 18-107.

The government’s move came as something of a surprise, in light of recent news that a memorandum, originating from the Civil Rights Office in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), is circulating within the Trump Administration proposing to adopt a regulation defining “sex” in terms solely of genitals and chromosomes and thus, effectively, excluding “gender identity” as part of the definition of sex for purposes of federal law.

The Solicitor General’s brief argues that instead, the Court should focus on one or both of two Petitions now pending that seek review of decisions by the 2nd Circuit and the 11th Circuit on the question whether sexual orientation discrimination is prohibited by Title VII. In the former case, Zarda v. Altitude Express, the en banc 2nd Circuit reversed prior circuit precedents and ruled that sexual orientation claims are covered by Title VII, following the lead of the 7th Circuit in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College (2017). In the other case, Bostock v. Clayton County, an 11th Circuit three-judge panel rejected a similar sexual orientation discrimination claim, and the circuit court turned down a petition for rehearing by the full circuit. In the Supreme Court, these cases are Bostock v. Clayton County Board of Commissioners, No. 17-1618, and Altitude Express v. Zarda, No. 17-1623.

In those two cases, the central question for the Court to decide is whether Title VII’s use of the term “sex” should be construed as the Trump Administration contends that it should be, as the simple difference between male and female as identified at birth, usually by the doctor’s visual inspection of genitals, or whether it should receive a broad interpretation that the EEOC and some lower federal courts have embraced, extending protection against discrimination to LGBTQ people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity as form of “discrimination because of sex.” This argument, for those preoccupied with the presumed legislative intent of the drafters and adopters of legislation, is based on the proposition that the Congress of 1964 did not intend to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination when they voted to include “sex” as a prohibited ground of employment discrimination in Title VII.

Referring to the pending sexual orientation case petitions, General Francisco’s brief argues, “If the Court grants plenary review in Zarda, Bostock, or both to address that question, its decision on the merits may bear on the proper analysis of the issues petitioner raises [in this case]. The court of appeals here relied on the reasoning of decisions (including Zarda) holding that Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination extends to sexual-orientation discrimination. Accordingly, the Court should hold the petition in this case pending its disposition of the petitions in Zarda and Bostock and, if certiorari is granted in either or both of those cases, pending the Court’s decision on the merits.” If the Court were to grant review in Zarda and/or Bostock, oral argument would be held sometime in the Spring with a decision expected by the end of June 2019, at which time the Court could send the Funeral Homes case back to the 6th Circuit for reconsideration in light of its decision in the sexual orientation cases, avoiding deciding the gender identity question itself. The Supreme Court has yet to issue a ruling on the question whether either the Constitution or federal statues protect transgender people from discrimination because of their gender identity.

Francisco’s brief also argues that the Court should not grant review in the Funeral Home case even if it decides not to review the sexual orientation cases. “To be sure,” says the brief, “the United States disagrees with the court of appeals’ decision. As relevant here, the court’s analysis of whether petitioner engaged in improper sex stereotyping reflects a misreading of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228 (1989). The court’s further conclusion that gender-identity discrimination necessarily constitutes discrimination because of sex in violation of Title VII – although it was unnecessary to the ultimate result the court reached in this case – is also inconsistent with the statute’s text and this Court’s precedent. Both of those questions are recurring and important.”

This immediately raises the question why the Court should refuse to grant review to decide questions that are “recurring and important”? The Solicitor General’s response to that question appears to be improvised to cover over a difficult political transition that will eventually take place at the EEOC, the agency that filed suit against the Funeral Home on behalf of Aimee Stephens and is nominally the respondent on this petition at the Supreme Court.

President Trump has nominated three commissioners, one of whom, out lesbian Chai Feldblum (who was first appointed by President Obama and whose current term expires at the end of this year), has inspired fervent opposition from several Republican Senators. The other two nominees are Republicans whom the current Senate leadership would eagerly approve, but the three nominations were presented as a package, in recognition of the statutory requirement that no more than three of the five EEOC commissioners may be members of the same party, and the package has not moved in the Senate because of opposition to Feldblum. As of now, the EEOC has three commissioners – two Democrats and one Republican – and continues to take discrimination complaints under Title VII from LGBTQ people. If the package of nominees is approved, the new Republican majority of commissioners would likely come into line with the Justice Department’s position that Title VII does not cover such claims. If the “package” is not approved during the lame duck session of Congress, the EEOC will not be able to decide cases beginning on January 1, because it will lack a quorum of at least three Senate-confirmed commissioners. And the question of which party controls the next Senate will certainly affect which Trump nominees can be approved after January 3 when the new Senate convenes.

Setting aside the politics for the moment, however, the Solicitor General’s pragmatic argument is that there is a significant split among the circuit courts on the sexual orientation issues, which requires the Supreme Court to resolve with some urgency. But, says the brief, “Fewer circuits have addressed the questions presented in this case, and the panel decision here appears to be the first court of appeals decision to conclude in a Title VII case that gender identity discrimination categorically constitutes discrimination because of sex under that statute. If the Court determines that the question raised in Zarda and Bostock does not warrant plenary review at this time, the questions presented here would likewise not appear to warrant review at this juncture.”

Attorneys from the ACLU representing Aimee Stephens also filed a response to the Harris Funeral Homes’ petition on October 24. They argue that the Court should deny the petition.

They note that the Funeral Homes petition’s first “Question Presented” is “Whether the word ‘sex’ in Title VII’s prohibition on discrimination ‘because of sex’ meant ‘gender identity’ and included ‘transgender status’ when Congress enacted Title VII in 1964.” They argue that this case is a “poor vehicle for addressing petitioner’s first question because deciding it would not affect the judgment” of the lower court. This is because, simply stated, the 6th Circuit decided this case on alternative grounds, one of which was relying on a sex stereotyping theory (that the Funeral Home fired Stephens for not complying with the employer’s stereotype about how a genitally-male person should groom and dress), the other of which identified discrimination because of gender identity as a form of sex discrimination. So answering the first question in the negative would still leave the lower court’s judgment intact on the first – and widely-accepted – sex stereotyping theory. Note that this first “Question Presented” is only relevant at all if the Court attributes any special weight to what the adaptors of statutory language thought it meant at the time they adopted it: an originalist approach to statutory interpretation that the Court itself rejected in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services in 1998.

The second question in the Funeral Homes petition is whether Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins “prohibits employers from applying sex-specific policies according to their employees’ sex rather than their gender identity.” As to that, the ACLU’s brief argues that the second question “was not adjudicated below and is not properly presented” to the Court in this case, because, first, the 6th Circuit held that Stephens was fired “based on multiple sex stereotypes, not only those related to the dress code,” and second, that the 6th Circuit “expressly did not address the lawfulness of sex-specific dress codes” in its decision, and that “sex-specific restroom policies” – an issue alluded to in the Funeral Homes petition — “are not at issue in this case.” Citing cases from many different circuits, the brief also argues that the 6th Circuit’s ruling “does not conflict with Price Waterhouse or any court of appeals.” Over the years since 1989, numerous circuit courts have accepted transgender discrimination claims using the sex stereotyping theory that the Supreme Court articulated in Price Waterhouse.

The government’s brief is undoubtedly disappointing to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the right-wing religious litigation group that is representing the Funeral Homes and urgently seeks review in this case, seemingly confident that the newly constituted Republican majority in the Supreme Court would likely overturn the 6th Circuit’s decision. After the Supreme Court Clerk listed the two sexual orientation petitions on the agenda for the Court’s end-of-September conference, ADF sent a letter to the Clerk, suggesting that the Court defer deciding whether to review those cases until after briefing was completed on the Funeral Homes petition – which was delayed because the Solicitor General twice requested and received from the Court an extension of time to file its response on behalf of the EEOC. ADF argued that the underlying questions in all three cases were related, so the Court should take them up together. Shortly after the letter was entered on the Court’s docket, the sexual orientation cases were removed from the agenda for the Court’s cert conference, and they had not been relisted for consideration. Now ADF finds the government arguing that the Court should not take up the cases together, and that the gender identity case should be deferred until the sexual orientation cases are decided, and should not even be addressed by the Court now if the Court decides not to take up the sexual orientation cases! ADF would likely see this as a lost opportunity to get the new Supreme Court majority to cut short the successful campaign by civil rights litigators to get federal courts to find protection for LGBTQ people under federal sex discrimination laws, an easier route to protection than passage of the Equality Act, which has been languishing in Congress for several years, denied even a hearing by the Republican-controlled chambers.

Although the S.G. attributed its requests for extensions of time to the need to deal with many other cases, it is possible that the S.G. was stalling in hopes that the new majority of EEOC commissioners would be quickly confirmed, and that the Commission would bring its position in line with the Justice Department (DOJ). Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued an internal DOJ memo on October 4, 2017, rejecting any interpretation of Title VII (or other federal sex discrimination laws, such as Title IX of the Education Amendments Act or the Fair Housing Act) that covered gender identity or sexual orientation. During the early months of the Trump Administration, the Justice Department and the Education Department (DOE) abandoned the Obama Administration’s interpretation of Title IX, getting the Supreme Court to cancel an argument under that statute in transgender teen Gavin Grimm’s lawsuit against a Virginia school district over bathroom access, and DOE has stopped accepting and process discrimination claims from transgender students. Thus, DOJ may feel that it can overturn the Obama Administration’s expansive interpretation of sex discrimination laws without having to win a case in the Supreme Court. The government’s brief devotes several pages to restating the Sessions memorandum’s interpretation of Title VII and criticizing the 6th Circuit’s decision on the merits.

Court watchers noted something interesting about the brief filed by the Solicitor General. The list of attorneys on the brief does not include any lawyers from the EEOC, which is unusual when the government is representing a federal agency in a Supreme Court appeal of one of their lower court victories. In this case, of course, DOJ and the EEOC have a strong disagreement about the correct interpretation of Title VII, so DOJ, representing the Trump Administration’s position, is not inclined to let the lingering Democratic majority at the Commission have any say in how this case is argued at the Supreme Court.

With the government opposing its own victory in the lower court, the only party left to defend the lower court’s ruling is Aimee Stephens with her counsel from the ACLU, whose brief is signed by attorneys from the ACLU Foundation in Chicago, the ACLU Fund of Michigan, the ACLU LGBT Rights Project headquartered in New York, and the ACLU Foundation’s office in Washington.

Of course, if the Supreme Court ultimately decides to grant review in any of these Title VII cases, it can expect a barrage of amicus curiae briefs similar to the record-setting number filed in last term’s Masterpiece Cakeshop case.

2nd Circuit, En Banc, Votes 10-3 That Sexual Orientation Discrimination Violates Federal Employment Discrimination Law

Posted on: February 26th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, with appellate jurisdiction over federal cases from New York, Connecticut and Vermont, ruled on February 26 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination because of an individual’s sex, also makes it unlawful for employers to discriminate against a person because of his or her sexual orientation.

 

The ruling in Zarda v. Altitude Express, Inc., 2018 U.S. App. LEXIS 4608, was not unexpected, as the questions and comments of the judges during the oral argument held on September 26, 2017, suggested general agreement that it was time for the 2nd Circuit to bring its case law in line with the evolving understanding that sexual orientation discrimination is a form of sex discrimination.

 

The Zarda ruling widens a split among federal appeals courts, as the 2nd Circuit joins the Chicago-based 7th Circuit, which ruled the same way last spring in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, in departing from the consensus of all the other circuit courts that have previously addressed the issue.  Although the Supreme Court recently refused to review a three-judge panel decision from the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit, Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, which had decided the other way, the Zarda ruling makes it more likely that the Court will soon take up the issue, especially if an employer on the losing end of the argument petitions the court to do so.

 

The Zarda case dates from the summer of 2010, when Donald Zarda, an openly gay sky-diving instructor, was fired by Altitude Express after a female customer’s boyfriend complained that Zarda had “come out” to his girlfriend while preparing for a “tandem skydive” during which they would be strapped together.

 

Zarda complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which at that time had not yet accepted the idea that sexual orientation claims violate Title VII. In his EEOC charge, Zarda asserted that he suffered discrimination because of his gender, complaining that he was fired because he “honestly referred to [his] sexual orientation and did not conform to the straight male macho stereotype.”  The EEOC, which did not then take a position on the merits of his claim, issued him a letter authorizing him to bring a lawsuit, which he did in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

 

Zarda’s court complaint cited Title VII, alleging sex discrimination (including discrimination because of a failure to conform to gender stereotypes), and the New York Human Rights Law, which explicitly outlaws sexual orientation discrimination.  The district court rejected his Title VII claim, following 2nd Circuit precedent, but allowed his state law claim to go to trial, where a jury ultimately ruled against him.  By the time of the trial, unfortunately, Zarda had died in a sky-diving accident, but the lawsuit was continued by his estate, seeking damages for employment discrimination.

 

In July 2015, the EEOC changed its view of the sexual orientation issue under Title VII, issuing a decision in the case of David Baldwin, a gay air traffic controller suing the U.S. Transportation Department.  The EEOC held that when an employer discriminates because of a person’s sexual orientation, the employer is unlawfully taking account of the person’s sex in making an employment decision.  Zarda’s Estate sought reconsideration of its Title VII claim from the district court, but was turned down, and encountered the same rejection from a three-judge panel of the court of appeals last spring.  The three-judge panel consisted of Circuit Judges Dennis Jacobs, Robert Sack, and Gerard Lynch.

 

However, in a different case decided last spring, Christiansen v. Omnicom Group, also presenting the sexual orientation issue under Title VII, a three-judge panel applied 2nd Circuit precedent to reject a sexual orientation claim but, in a concurring opinion, Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, taking note of the 7th Circuit’s Hively ruling and the EEOC’s Baldwin decision, suggested that the 2nd Circuit should reconsider its precedent in an appropriate case.  That would require a rare “en banc” review by the full bench of the Circuit.  The Zarda case, decided shortly after Christiansen, provided the opportunity for this, and the Circuit voted to grant a petition for reconsideration.

 

The panel that heard arguments on September 26 included all eleven active judges of the circuit plus two senior judges, Robert Sack and Gerard Lynch, who were part of the three-judge panel whose decision was being reconsidered.

 

All ten judges in the majority agreed with the proposition that individuals can bring a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title VII, but only five judges agreed to base their decision on the three different theories that the EEOC and the 7th Circuit had embraced in their decisions.

 

Judge Katzmann wrote what the court described as the “majority opinion,” basically channeling his concurring opinion from the Christiansen case.  “Logically, because sexual orientation is a function of sex and sex is a protected characteristic under title VII, it follows that sexual orientation is also protected,” wrote Katzmann, explaining the first of three theoretical bases for the ruling, continuing that “because sexual orientation discrimination is a function of sex, and is comparable to sexual harassment, gender stereotyping, and other evils longs recognized as violating Title VII, the statute must prohibit it.”

 

“Our conclusion is reinforced by the Supreme Court’s test for determining whether an employment practice constitutes sex discrimination,” he continued.  “This approach, which we call the ‘comparative test,’ determines whether the trait that is the basis for discrimination is a function of sex by asking whether an employee’s treatment would have been different ‘but for that person’s sex.’”  Here her reverted to the 7th Circuit’s Hively decision, where that court found that a lesbian college professor, a woman who was attracted to women, would not have been fired if she was attracted to men.  “But for” her being a woman, her attraction to women would not have led to her discharge.

 

“To determine whether a trait operates as a proxy for sex,” he wrote, “we ask whether the employee would have been treated differently ‘but for’ his or her sex.  In the context of sexual orientation, a woman who is subject to an adverse employment action because she is attracted to a woman would have been treated differently if she had been a man who was attracted to women.  We can therefore conclude that sexual orientation is a function of sex and, by extension, sexual orientation discrimination is a subset of sex discrimination.”

 

The second theory is the gender stereotype theory.  “Specifically,” wrote Katzmann, “this framework demonstrates that sexual orientation discrimination is almost invariably rooted in stereotypes about men and women.”  He reviewed the history of Supreme Court rulings developing the stereotype theory in the context of sex discrimination.

 

Finally, he turned to the associational theory, noting that the 2nd Circuit had accepted this theory in the context of race discrimination in a 2008 decision involving a white man who was discharged because he had married a black woman.  The court had found that this was discrimination because of both his race and the race of his wife, and thus violated Title VII.  Applying the reasoning of that case, he wrote, “if a male employee married to a man is terminated because his employer disapproves of same-sex marriage, the employee has suffered associational discrimination based on his own sex because ‘the fact that the employee is a man instead of a woman motivated the employer’s discrimination against him,’” quoting from the EEOC’s Baldwin decision.

 

Katzmann rejected the argument that the failure of Congress to approve any of more than fifty bills that have been introduced since the 1970s to add sexual orientation to the prohibited grounds for discrimination under federal law should defeat Zarda’s claim, or that the failure of Congress to address this issue when it amended Title VII in 1991 to overrule several Supreme Court decisions on other discrimination issues should be construed to constitute congressional approval of the three court of appeals decision that had up to that time rejected sexual orientation claims under Title VII.

 

This appeal was unusual in that the government filed amicus briefs and made arguments on both sides of the issue.  The EEOC filed a brief supporting the Zarda Estate’s claim that Title VII covers sexual orientation claims, consistent with its ruling in the Baldwin case, but the Justice Department filed a brief and participated in the oral argument on the other side, taking the view, consistent with Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announced position, that Title VII does not cover sexual orientation or gender identity claims.  A large portion of Judge Katzman’s opinion, which runs over 65 pages, was devoted to refuting various arguments made by the Justice Department.

 

Several of the concurring judges joined the result but limited their agreement to the associational discrimination theory, finding it to be consistent with the Circuit’s 2008 race discrimination case.  Judge Dennis Jacobs went further, explaining why he was not convinced by the other theories accepted by Judge Katzmann.  Judge Raymond Lohier, Jr., premised his agreement on Judge Katzmann’s “but for” argument.

 

Judge Jose Cabranes concurred in the judgment without signing on to any of the other opinions, characterizing this as “a straightforward case of statutory construction.” He wrote, “Zarda’s sexual orientation is a function of his sex.  Discrimination against Zarda because of his sexual orientation therefore is discrimination because of his sex, and is prohibited by Title VII.  That should be the end of the analysis.”

 

Judge Lynch’s dissenting opinion was actually longer than Judge Katzmann’s majority opinion, providing a detailed history of the adoption of Title VII to support his agreement with Judge Diane Sykes of the 7th Circuit (who dissented in the Hively case) that the court must confine its interpretation of Title VII to what the legislators thought they were enacting in 1964.  Their argument is that the role of the court in statutory interpretation is relatively modest, and does not extend to “updating” statutes to embrace new legal principles that are not clearly logical extensions of what the legislature intended to address.  Lynch went out of his way to say multiple times that he thinks sexual orientation discrimination is a bad thing, to laud the states that have banned such discrimination, and to bemoan the failure of Congress to address the issue.  But, he insisted, it was not the role of the court to impose new legal obligations on private employers under the guise of interpreting a statute adopted more than fifty years ago. Judges Debra Ann Livingston and Reena Raggi also dissented, agreeing with Judge Lynch.

 

Thus, the three dissenters premised their view on a judicial philosophy concerning the statutory construction rather than a view about whether sexual orientation discrimination should be illegal.

 

New York, Connecticut and Vermont already have state laws banning sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace, so the 2nd Circuit’s ruling does not alter the obligations of employers and the rights of employees in a substantial way.  But it opens the doors of the federal court houses to such discrimination claims, and there are some ways in which Title VII can provider a broader range of protection than the state laws.  For example, at the Zarda trial, the judge gave a jury charge that required a finding that Zarda’s sexual orientation was the motivating factor in his discharge.  Such a charge would be too narrow under Title VII, where a jury could find a statutory violation as long as sexual orientation was “a factor,” even if there were other factors contributing to the decision.  Thus, the jury’s verdict on the state law claim will not preclude a ruling in favor of Zarda’s Estate when the case is returned to the district court for disposition of the Title VII claim.

 

New York solo practitioner Gregory Antollino has represented first Zarda and then his Estate throughout the proceedings, with Stephen Bergstein as co-counsel for the Estate. Altitude Express, which now has to decide whether to petition the Supreme Court for review or to defend the case back in the Eastern District court, is represented by Saul D. Zabell of Bohemia, New York.  Arguing as amicus in support of Zarda were Jeremy Horowitz from the EEOC and Gregory Nevins from Lambda Legal.  Arguing as amicus in support of Altitude Express were Hashim M. Mooppan from the Justice Department and Adam K. Mortara, of Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP, Chicago, as a court-appointed amicus. The case attracted many other amicus curiae filings, including from the LGBT Bar Association of Greater New York, and a wide array of civil rights, civil liberties, and LGBT rights groups in support of Zarda’s appeal.  On the other side were arrayed the Justice Department and some conservative groups, including the Christian Legal Society, the National Association of Evangelicals, the U.S. Justice Foundation, and the Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund.

 

 

Justice Department Tells 2nd Circuit That Gays Are Not Protected from Discrimination Under Federal Civil Rights Law

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

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a brief on July 26 with the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, weighing in on the question whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination because of sexual orientation.  Not surprisingly, the Trump Administration’s answer is “No.”

 

Title VII lists forbidden grounds for employment discrimination: race or color, religion, sex and national origin. After it went into effect in July 1965, both the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency charged with enforcement of the statute, and the federal courts quickly took the position that people who encountered discrimination because they were gay or transgender could not pursue a claim under this law.  Both the administrative agency and the federal courts held fast to that position until relatively recently.

 

That consensus began to break down early in this century, first in response to discrimination claims by transgender people, as courts and then the EEOC (in 2012) accepted the argument that discriminating against somebody because they were transitioning or had transitioned was actually discrimination because of sex. The rationale they adopted derived from a 1989 decision by the Supreme Court, which recognized that discrimination against people for failing to comply with the employer’s stereotyped view about how people of a particular sex should behave, dress, or otherwise act, was actually discrimination because of their sex.  The 1989 case involved a woman who was denied a partnership in an accounting firm because some of the partners thought she was not sufficiently feminine to meet their image of a “lady partner,” and her immediate boss told her she should get her hair styled and start wearing makeup and jewelry if she wanted to be a partner.

 

By 2015, the EEOC had taken the analysis one step further to cover sexual orientation claims. It recognized that having a same-sex attraction violates gender stereotypes, similarly to the transgender cases, but also drew analogies to cases where courts found that discriminating against an employee for being in an interracial relationship was a form of race discrimination, called associational discrimination.  Further, the EEOC decided that it was really not plausible to distinguish between sexual orientation discrimination and sex discrimination, since both were concerned with treating people differently because of their sex.

 

Until this year, no federal appellate court had accepted these theories, but on April 4, the full bench of the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit became the first federal appeals court to rule that Title VII bans sexual orientation discrimination.  Reversing its prior precedents, the court accepted the EEOC’s analysis in a lawsuit by Kimberly Hively, a lesbian who had been denied a tenure-track position by an Indiana community college.  The college decided not to appeal, taking the position that it had not discriminated at all, so the case was sent back for trial to the district court.

 

Meanwhile, however, the same issue was being litigated in other parts of the country. In the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit, a sexual orientation discrimination claim by Jameka Evans against a Georgia hospital that had been dismissed by the district court was revived by the court of appeals, but on a narrower theory.  In common with several other circuits, the 11th Circuit will accept Title VII claims from gay plaintiffs who allege that they suffered discrimination because of their failure to conform to gender stereotypes.  In this case, while a three-judge panel ruled 2-1 to affirm the trial court’s rejection of the plaintiff’s sexual orientation discrimination claim, the panel sent the case back to the trial court to allow the plaintiff to pursue a sex stereotyping claim.  One member partially dissented, Judge William Pryor (who had been on Trump’s potential Supreme Court list), finding no basis for any Title VII claim by the plaintiff.  Another member of the court agreed to send the case back, but argued that Title VII should be interpreted to cover sexual orientation claims.  A third member found that the panel was bound by circuit precedent to reject the sexual orientation claim, but agreed that the plaintiff should have a chance to pursue a sex stereotype claim.  The 11th Circuit denied a petition to reconsider the Evans case “en banc” (by the full bench) a few weeks ago, and Lambda Legal announced that it will petition the Supreme Court to review the panel decision.  Lambda has until the first week of October to file its petition.

 

Meanwhile, however, within the 2nd Circuit, at least two federal district court judges have recently refused to dismiss sexual orientation claims under Title VII, finding that the circuit’s acceptance of the “associational theory” in a race discrimination case means that the court should accept sexual orientation discrimination claims.  Several other district judges have dismissed such claims, concluding that until the court of appeals explicitly overrules its earlier precedents, the trial judges are bound to follow them.  A few months ago, confronted by petitions for en banc review in three different cases, the Circuit announced that it would reconsider the panel decision in Estate of Donald Zarda v. Altitude Express.

 

In Zarda, the district court had dismissed a Title VII claim but allowed the case to go to trial under New York State’s Human Rights Law, which expressly outlaws sexual orientation discrimination. The jury ruled in favor of the employer, although it is questionable whether the jury was properly instructed about how to weigh the evidence.  The plaintiffs appealed the dismissal of the Title VII claim. A three-judge panel affirmed the district court’s dismissal, while noting that recent developments in the law could justify reconsideration by the full 2nd Circuit bench.  In a case decided by a different three-judge panel at around the same time, Christiansen v. Omnicom, the panel also upheld dismissal of a sexual orientation claim, but sent the case back to the district court for reconsideration as a sex stereotyping claim, and two of the judges joined a concurring opinion suggesting that it was time for the 2nd Circuit to reconsider the sexual orientation issue en banc in an “appropriate case.”  However, after granting en banc review in Zarda, the circuit court denied a petition for en banc review in Christiansen!

 

Briefs were due from the plaintiff’s side in the Zarda appeal during the last week in June. The EEOC, consistent with its interpretation of the statute, filed an amicus (friend of the court) brief in support of the Zarda. (Zarda, a sky-diving instructor, died in a diving accident after starting his discrimination case, so the lawsuit is now being pursued by his executors, seeking money damages for the estate.)    Briefs were due by July 26 from the employer and any amicus parties supporting its position.  After some suspense about what the Trump Administration might do, the Justice Department filed its brief right at the deadline.

 

It is somewhat unusual for the government to file an amicus brief in opposition to a position taken by a federal agency, and it is also unusual for the government to file a brief in a case between private parties – a former employee versus a business – but the federal government has a significant interest in this case, and the politics of EEOC v. DOJ are unusual because of the timing. Until this month, the majority of the EEOC Commissioners have been appointees of President Obama.  They decided the key sexual orientation case two years ago by a vote of 3-2, with the Republican commissioners dissenting.  Upon confirmation of Trump’s appointees to fill some vacancies, control of the EEOC will switch over to Republican hands.  But for now, the EEOC continues to pursue sexual orientation discrimination cases under Title VII, and has even filed some new lawsuits this year despite the change of administrations in January.  On the other hand, the Justice Department reflects the views of the new administration, which are consistent with those expressed by 7th Circuit Judge Diane Sykes (also on Trump’s potential Supreme Court list), who wrote a dissenting opinion in the Hively case.

 

Why does the Trump Administration have a strong interest in a case between private parties? Because Title VII has provisions banning sex discrimination in the federal workforce, and because the president’s political base and the Republicans in Congress stand in opposition to outlawing sexual orientation discrimination.  This is clear from the failure of Republican legislators to co-sponsor the Equality Act, a bill that would amend Title VII to add sexual orientation and gender identity or expression to the statutory list of forbidden grounds of employment discrimination.  A few Republicans were co-sponsors of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a narrower bill that was pending in Congress from the mid-1990s through Obama’s first term until it was supplanted by the Equality Act, but not enough to call that bipartisan legislation.  The Employment Non-Discrimination Act came up for floor votes once in each house of Congress but in different sessions of Congress.  On both of those occasions it received few votes from Republican legislators, and their party’s platform never endorsed it.

 

The Justice Department’s brief, noting the EEOC’s position in the case, states that “the EEOC is not speaking for the United States and its position about the scope of Title VII is entitled to no deference beyond its power to persuade.” And, almost needless to say, the Justice Department under the outspokenly anti-gay Jeff Sessions is not persuaded by any of the EEOC’s arguments.  The brief argues that Congress did not intend to ban sexual orientation discrimination in 1964 when it enacted Title VII and that should be the end of the matter.  The failure of Congress to approve any amendment to add sexual orientation to the law is cited as evidence of continuing legislative intent, and the brief argues that only Congress can change the law.  It argues at length that the theories embraced by the EEOC and the 7th Circuit are mistaken interpretations of the Supreme Court’s rulings on sex stereotyping and associational discrimination, and that there is a distinct difference between sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination, despite statements by many federal judges that they have difficulty drawing the line between the two.

 

The 2nd Circuit will not be oblivious to the political nature of the government’s opposition.  The concurring opinion in the Christiansen case, written by 2nd Circuit Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, virtually endorsed the EEOC’s interpretation of the statute while calling for the circuit to reconsider its earlier precedents.  And a majority of the judges who will sit on the en banc panel were appointed by Bill Clinton or Barack Obama and have generally taken a more liberal approach to interpreting Title VII.  The circuit’s earlier precedents that are being reconsidered were issued by three-judge panels at a time when the arguments for allowing sexual orientation discrimination claims were not nearly as well developed as they have been in recent years, and the circuit has accepted the associational discrimination theory in a race discrimination case after those earlier cases were decided.  It is likely to see that theory’s applicability here, as the district judges have commented.  However, if the Supreme Court decides to grant Lambda Legal’s petition to review the 11th Circuit case, it is possible that the 2nd Circuit will hold up on deciding the Zarda appeal until the Supreme Court has spoken.  Interesting timing issues will arise this fall.  The 2nd Circuit argument is scheduled for late in September, before the Supreme Court will begin its fall term and start announcing whether it will grant petitions for review filed over the summer.

 

The brief filed by Altitude Express in opposition to the appeal has raised significant jurisdictional arguments that would give the 2nd Circuit a way out of deciding this appeal on the merits, if the judges are so inclined.  That brief argues that when he filed his initial discrimination charge with the EEOC, Donald Zarda expressly disclaimed making a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title VII, relying instead on the allegation that he suffered discrimination for failing to comply with sex stereotypes.  That was the theory he initially presented in his federal court complaint under Title VII as well, and it was dismissed by the trial judge, who opined that Zarda’s factual allegations were not sufficient for a sex stereotyping claim.  Zarda only pressed a sexual orientation claim under the New York State Human Rights Law.  Thus, Altitude Express argues, he cannot now argue for a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title VII, because the statute requires that any claim first be presented to the administrative agency, and further that any ruling by the court of appeals on that question would be, in effect, an advisory opinion, as the jury has already ruled against his sexual orientation discrimination claim.  There’s no telling how the 2nd Circuit will respond to these arguments, but one suspects that if they had serious doubts about jurisdiction, they would not have granted the en banc petition.

 

In the meantime, however, it is clear that if the Supreme Court grants review in the 11th Circuit Evans case, the federal government, represented by the Solicitor General, will come into the case against the plaintiff, and by then the EEOC will be in Republican control and will probably not be filing a separate brief.  Once again, the Trump Administration is actively disavowing the LGBT-supportive stance that the candidate claimed during the election last year.  The brief was filed just as Trump was tweeting his decision to bar transgender people from military service, which seemed no coincidence.

Sexual Orientation Discrimination Under Title VII in the 2nd Circuit: A Work in Progress

Posted on: May 11th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

As the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ponders three petitions asking for en banc consideration of the question whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be interpreted to ban sexual orientation discrimination as a form of sex discrimination, a federal trial judge in Manhattan has ruled that “in light of the evolving state of the law,” it would be “imprudent” for the court to grant a motion to dismiss a gay plaintiff’s sexual orientation discrimination claim.

Senior District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, appointed by Bill Clinton in 1998, issued his ruling in Philpott v. State University of New York on May 3, the day after the third en banc petition was filed.   An en banc hearing in the 2nd Circuit involves participation by all eleven active judges in the circuit, plus any senior judges who participated in a three-judge panel decision that is being reheard en banc.  Appeals are normally heard by three-judge panels, which are bound to follow existing circuit precedents.  Only an en banc panel (or the Supreme Court) can reconsider and reverse such precedents.

The 2nd Circuit ruled in 2000, in the case of Simonton v. Runyon, that Title VII could not be interpreted to forbid sexual orientation discrimination.  This holding was reiterated by a second panel in 2005, in Dawson v. Bumble & Bumble, and yet again this year on March 27 in Christiansen v. Omnicom Group.  However, the 2nd Circuit’s Chief Judge, Robert Katzmann, who was sitting as a member of the panel in Christiansen, wrote a concurring opinion, joined by one of the other judges, arguing that the issue should be considered en banc in “an appropriate case.”  Katzmann’s discussion basically embraced the arguments articulated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in its 2015 decision holding that David Baldwin, a gay air traffic controller, could bring a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title VII against the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The first of the en banc petitions was filed on April 19 in Cargian v. Breitling USA, Inc., in which another Manhattan trial judge, George B. Daniels, dismissed a gay watch salesman’s Title VII sexual orientation discrimination claim, finding that 2nd Circuit appellate precedents binding on the court rejected sexual orientation claims as a form of sex discrimination.  Judge Daniels ruled on September 29, 2016, and Frederick Cargian filed an appeal to the 2nd Circuit.  When the Christiansen decision was issued on March 27, it became clear that Cargian’s appeal to a three-judge panel would be a waste of time and judicial resources, and the American Civil Liberties Union, representing Cargian along with the New York Civil Liberties Union and solo plaintiffs’ attorney Janice Goodman, decided to petition the Circuit to take the case up directly en banc.

The second petition was filed on April 28 by Matthew Christiansen’s attorney, Susan Chana Lask.   The three-judge panel in Christiansen’s case had refused to allow the case to continue on a sexual orientation discrimination theory, but had concluded that it was possible that Christiansen would be able to proceed under a gender stereotype theory.  The panel clarified the 2nd Circuit’s approach in such cases, rejecting the trial judge’s conclusion that if the factual allegations suggest that sexual orientation played a role in the discrimination suffered by the plaintiff, he would be not be allowed to proceed under Title VII.  The trial court’s approach overlooked an important element of Title VII, an amendment adopted in 1991 providing that a plaintiff is entitled to judgment if sex is a “motivating factor” in his or her case, even if other factors contributed to the employer’s discriminatory conduct.  The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that discriminating against an employee because the employee fails to conform to gender stereotypes is evidence of discrimination because of sex.  In such a case, the sexual orientation of the plaintiff would be irrelevant, so long as the plaintiff could show that gender stereotyping was a motivating factor in their mistreatment.

At first it appeared that Christiansen would not seek en banc review, despite Judge Katzmann’s concurring opinion, as the panel unanimously voted to send the case back to the district court for consideration as a gender stereotyping case. Attorney Lask was quoted in newspaper reports as preparing to proceed to trial on the stereotyping theory.  The ACLU’s en banc petition changed the game plan, evidently, and Christiansen’s en banc petition was filed on April 28.

Meanwhile, on April 18, a different panel of the 2nd Circuit decided Zarda v. Altitude Express, once again holding that a gay plaintiff could not advance a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title VII.  Gregory Antollino, an attorney for an executor of the Estate of Donald Zarda, a gay skydiving instructor who had died in a skydiving accident after the being discharged from his employment, filed a petition for en banc rehearing on May 2, with Stephen Bergstein of Bergstein & Ullrich as co-counsel representing a co-executor.

The very next day Judge Hellerstein issued his ruling, allowing Jeffrey Philpott, the gay former Vice President of Student Affairs at the State University of New York’s College of Optometry to pursue his Title VII sexual orientation discrimination, hostile environment and retaliation claims. Judge Hellerstein rejected the defendant’s alternative argument that even if sexual orientation discrimination is covered by Title VII, Philpott’s factual allegations were insufficient to support his claims.  However, Judge Hellerstein joined with several other district judges within the 2nd Circuit in ruling that an employee of an educational institution may not bring an employment discrimination claim under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1992, which bans sex discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal money.  Although the plain language of Title IX can be interpreted to cover employment discrimination claims, Hellerstein agreed with other courts that have found that Congress did not intend to supplant Title VII, with its specific time deadlines and administrative exhaustion requirements, for employees of educational institutions who have sex discrimination claims.

After briefly describing the 2nd Circuit precedents, Hellerstein noted defendant’s argument that the court must dismiss the sexual orientation claims, and also Philpott’s request for leave to file an amended complaint focused on gender stereotyping.  “Neither relief is appropriate,” wrote the judge.  “The law with respect to this legal question is clearly in a state of flux, and the Second Circuit, or perhaps the Supreme Court, may return to this question soon.  In light of the evolving state of the law, dismissal of plaintiff’s Title VII claim is improper.”

Hellerstein then provided a summary of Judge Katzmann’s Christiansen concurrence, which he referred to more than once as a “majority concurrence” as it was signed by two of the three panel members. Hellerstein pointed to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals en banc decision in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, issued on April 4, in which “the Seventh Circuit became the first Court of Appeals to unequivocally hold that ‘discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is a form of sex discrimination’ and therefore cognizable under Title VII.”

“Among other reasons,” wrote Hellerstein, “the Seventh Circuit made this ruling ‘to bring our law into conformity with the Supreme Court’s teachings.’ The Seventh Circuit was also compelled by ‘the common-sense reality that it is actually impossible to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation without also discriminating on the basis of sex.’”

Hellerstein asserted that because Philpott “has stated a claim for sexual orientation discrimination, ‘common sense’ dictates that he has also stated a claim for gender stereotyping discrimination, which is cognizable under Title VII. The fact that plaintiff has framed his complaint in terms of sexual orientation discrimination and not gender stereotyping discrimination is immaterial.  I decline to embrace an ‘illogical’ and artificial distinction between gender stereotyping discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination, and in so doing, I join several other courts throughout the country.”

A few days after Hellerstein’s ruling, another panel of the 2nd Circuit avoided dealing with the same question in Magnusson v. County of Suffolk, an appeal from a May 2016 ruling by District Judge Sandra Feuerstein in the Eastern District of New York (Long Island).  Judge Feuerstein had rejected Arline Magnussen’s sexual orientation harassment Title VII claim on alternative grounds: that 2nd Circuit precedent does not allow sexual orientation claims, and that the employer could not be held liable under Title VII because Magnussen had unreasonably failed to invoke the employer’s internal grievance procedure to deal with her harassment complaint.  In a short memorandum signed by the Clerk of the Court, the 2nd Circuit ruled on May 11 that it need not address the Title VII interpretation issue in light of the district court’s finding that the employer could not held liable for whatever harassment the plaintiff might have suffered.

In terms of en banc review, in both Cargian and Zarda the court would face a case where the only stereotyping claim that would be viable would be that as gay men the plaintiffs did not conform to the stereotype that men should be attracted to women, so it would have to deal directly with the question whether sexual orientation is, as the EEOC stated and the 7th Circuit accepted, “necessarily” sex discrimination.  In Christiansen, the appellate panel found that the plaintiff might invoke other gender stereotype issues to make a viable claim under Title VII under the Circuit’s existing precedents, thus providing a less certain vehicle for getting the Circuit to confront the central legal issue.

If the 2nd Circuit grants the Christiansen or Cargian petitions, the en banc panel would consist of the eleven active members of the court.  If it grants the Zarda petition, those judges could be joined by two senior judges, Robert Sack and Gerard Lynch, who sat on the three-judge panel.  Of the eleven active judges, a majority were appointed by Democratic presidents: three by Clinton and four by Obama.  If the senior judges are added, a thirteen-member panel would include four appointed by Clinton and five appointed by Obama.  It is not clear from the Circuit’s published rules whether the senior judges could participate if the Circuit decides to consolidate the cases for rehearing en banc, but it is possible that they could only participate in deciding the Zarda case.

Lecture for Investiture as Robert F. Wagner Professor of Labor and Employment Law

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

Arthur S. Leonard, Lecture for Investiture as Robert F. Wagner Professor of Labor and Employment Law, New York Law School, April 26, 2017

A Battle Over Statutory Interpretation: Title VII and Claims of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination

I feel particularly honored to have my name associated with that of United States Senator Robert F. Wagner, Sr., NYLS Class of 1900, a hero of the New Deal whose legislative leadership gave us such important achievements as the National Labor Relations Act – commonly known among labor law practitioners as the Wagner Act – and the Social Security Act — laws that have shaped our nation for generations.   Senator Wagner was an immigrant who made an indelible mark on the United States. I hope that in some small way I have made a contribution that makes this named chair fitting.

I decided to select a topic for this talk that would bring together the two major areas of my teaching and scholarship: labor and employment law, and sexuality law. These intersect in the question whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans employment discrimination against an individual because of his or her sex, will be open to claims by job applicants and workers that they have suffered discrimination because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. We are at a decisive point in the judicial battle over that question, having achieved just weeks ago the breakthrough of our first affirmative appellate ruling on the sexual orientation question, following several years of encouraging developments on the gender identity question.

To understand the significance of this, we have to go back more than half a century, to the period after World War II when the modern American gay rights movement began stirring with the protests of recent military veterans against unequal benefits treatment, with the formation of pioneering organizations like the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles and New York and The Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco, and with the vital behind-the-scenes work undertaken by gay scholars as the great law reform effort of the Model Penal Code was being launched by the American Law Institute. That postwar period of the late 1940s and 1950s played out alongside the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, for which the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a signal achievement.

The early gay rights advocacy groups had their lists of goals, and some kind of protection against discrimination was prominent among them, but that task seemed monumental, at a time when there was no federal statute prohibiting employment discrimination of any kind. Until Illinois adopted the Model Penal Code in 1960, which effectively repealed criminal sanctions for private consensual gay sex, it was a crime in every state; a serious felony with long prison sentences in many. President Dwight Eisenhower issued an executive order shortly after taking office banning the employment of “homosexuals” and “sexual perverts” in the federal civil service. A major immigration law passed during the 1950s for the first time barred homosexuals from immigrating to the U.S. and qualifying for citizenship by labeling us as being “afflicted by psychopathic personality,” making us excludable on medical grounds. The military barred gay people from serving on similar grounds, and many lines of work that required state licensing and determinations of moral fitness systematically excluded LGBT people. To be an ‘openly gay’ lawyer or doctor was virtually unthinkable in the 1950s and on into the 1960s.

When Congress was considering the landmark civil rights bill, first introduced during the Kennedy Administration and shepherded into law by Lyndon Johnson, the idea that lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people might seek or obtain assistance rather than condemnation from Congress seemed a pipe dream. None of the legislators involved with the bill proposed protecting members of these groups from discrimination. Title VII, the provision of the bill dealing with employment discrimination, was limited in its original form to discrimination because of race or color, religion, or national origin. A floor amendment, introduced by Howard Smith of Virginia, a conservative Southern Democrat who was opposed to the bill, proposed to add “sex” to the prohibited grounds for discrimination. The amendment carried, the bill passed, and it went to the Senate where it was held up by one of the longest filibusters in history – at a time when filibusters involved unbroken floor debate by the opponents of a pending measure, with no vote on the merits until the Chamber was thoroughly exhausted and no opponent could be found to continue speaking. The leadership of the Senate, trying to avoid having the bill bottled up in committees headed by conservative senior Southern senators, had sent the bill direct to the floor with a tight limit on amendments. Thus committee reports that would have provided a source of legislative history on the meaning of “sex” in the bill are missing. The only floor amendment relating to the addition of “sex” to Title VII was to clarify that pay practices that were authorized under the Equal Pay Act, which had been passed the year before, would not be held to violate Title VII. The statute contained no definition of “sex,” and in the early years after its passage, the general view, held by the courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was that the ban on sex discrimination simply prohibited employers from treating women worse than men – with little agreement about what that meant. In fact, in an early interpretive foray, the Supreme Court decided that Title VII did not prohibit discrimination against women because they became pregnant. The resulting public outcry inspired Congress to amend the statute to make clear that discrimination against a woman because of pregnancy or childbirth was considered to be discrimination because of sex.

Early attempts by gay or transgender people to pursue discrimination claims under Title VII all failed. The EEOC and the courts agreed that protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation or transgender status was not intended by Congress. They embraced a literalistic “plain language” interpretation of Title VII, including a narrow biological understanding of sex.

But something began to happen as the courts considered a wider variety of sex discrimination claims. It became clear that a simplistic concept of sex would not be adequate to achieve the goal of equality of opportunity in the workplace. Legal theorists had been advancing the concept of a “hostile environment” as a form of discrimination, first focusing on the open hostility that many white workers showed to black, Latino and Asian workers in newly-integrated workplaces. During the 1970s the courts began to expand that concept to women who experienced hostility in formerly all-male workplaces as well. Lower federal courts were divided about whether such “atmospherics” of the workplace could be considered terms or conditions of employment when they didn’t directly involve refusals to hire or differences in pay or work assignments. Finally the Supreme Court broke that deadlock in 1986, holding in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson that a woman who experienced workplace hostility so severe that it could be said to affect her terms and conditions of employment would have a sex discrimination claim under Title VII, and subsequent cases clarified that the plaintiff did not have to show a tangible injury, although a finding that working conditions were so intolerable that a reasonable person would quit would clearly meet the test of a hostile environment. Some courts began to extend this reasoning to complaints by men, in situations where male co-workers subjected them to verbal and even physical harassment.

The Court also began to grapple with the problem of sex stereotypes, and how easily employers and co-workers could fall into stereotyped thinking to the disadvantage of minorities and women. Stereotypes about young mothers’ ability to balance work and home obligations, stereotypes about the ability of women to do physically challenging working, stereotypes about female longevity and the costs of retirement plans – all of these issues came before the Court and ultimately led it to expand the concept of sex discrimination more broadly than legislators of the mid-1960s might have imagined.

The key stereotyping case for building a theory of protection for sexual minorities was decided in 1989 – Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins. Ann Hopkins’ bid for partnership was denied because some partners of the firm considered her inadequately feminine. They embraced a stereotype about how a woman partner was supposed to look and behave. Hopkins, with her loud and abrasive manner and appearance, failed to conform to that stereotype. Communicating the firm’s decision to pass over her partnership application, the head of her office told her she could improve her chances for the next round by dressing more femininely, walking more femininely, toning down her speech, wearing make-up and jewelry, having her hair styled. Her substantial contributions to the firm and her leadership in generating new business counted for little, when decision-makers decided she was inadequately feminine to meet their expectations. In an opinion by Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., the Court accepted Hopkins’ argument that allowing such considerations to affect the partnership decision could be evidence of a prohibited discriminatory motivation under Title VII. The Court’s opinion embraced the idea that discrimination because of “gender,” not just discrimination because of biological sex, came within the scope of Title VII’s prohibition. The statutory policy included wiping away gender stereotypes that created barriers to equal opportunity for women in the workplace.

Although Ann Hopkins was not a lesbian and nothing was said about homosexuality in her case, the implications of the ruling became obvious over time as federal courts dealt with a variety of stereotyping claims. A person who suffered discrimination because she did not appear or act the way people expected a woman to appear or act was protected, and that sounded to lots of people like a description of discrimination against transgender people and some – but perhaps not all – lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. The argument seemed particularly strong when an employer discriminated against a person who was hired appearing and acting as a man and then began to transition to living life as a woman.

At the same time, legal academics had begun to publish theoretical arguments supporting the idea that discrimination against gay people was a form of sex discrimination. Among the earliest were Professor Sylvia Law of New York University, whose 1988 article in the Wisconsin Law Review, titled “Homosexuality and the Social Meaning of Gender,” suggested that anti-gay discrimination was about “preserving traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity. Law’s pioneering work was quickly followed by the first of many articles by Andrew Koppelman, first in a student note he published in the Yale Law Journal in 1988 titled “The Miscegenation Analogy: Sodomy Law as Sex Discrimination,” later in his 1994 article in the New York University Law Review titled “Why Discrimination Against Lesbians and Gay Men is Sex Discrimination.” Both Koppelman, now a professor at Northwestern University, and Law proposed theoretical arguments for treating anti-gay discrimination as sex discrimination.

Seizing upon the Price Waterhouse precedent, transgender people and gay people began to succeed in court during the 1990s by arguing that their failure to conform to gender stereotypes was the reason they were denied hiring or continued employment, desirable assignments or promotions. A strange dynamic began to grow in the courts, as judges repeated, over and over again, that Title VII did not prohibit discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity, as such, but that it did prohibit discrimination against a person because of his or her failure to conform to gender stereotypes and expectations, regardless of the plaintiff’s sexual orientation. Many of the courts insisted, however, that there was one gender stereotype that could not be the basis of a Title VII claim – that men should be attracted only to women, and women should be attracted only to men. To allow a plaintiff to assert such a claim would dissolve the line that courts were trying to preserve between sex stereotyping claims and sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination claims. Decades of past precedents stood in the way of acknowledging the unworkability of that line.

Ten years after the Price Waterhouse decision, the Supreme Court decided another sex discrimination case, Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, with an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia that helped to fuel the broadening interpretation of Title VII. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that a man who is subjected to workplace harassment of a sexual nature by other men could not bring a hostile environment sex discrimination claim under Title VII. The court of appeals reasoned that Congress intended in 1964 to prohibit discrimination against women because they were women or men because they were men, and that such a limited intent could not encompass claims of same-sex harassment, which would be beyond the expectations of the legislators who passed that law. In reversing this ruling, Justice Scalia, who was generally skeptical about the use of legislative history to interpret statutes, wrote for the Court that the interpretation of Title VII was not restricted to the intentions of the 1964 Congress. While conceding that same-sex harassment was not one of the “evils” that Congress intended to attack by passing Title VII, he wrote:

“Statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils, and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed. Title VII prohibits discrimination because of sex in employment. This must extend to sex-based discrimination of any kind that meets the statutory requirements.”

Thus, as our collective, societal understanding of sex, gender, sexuality, identity and orientation broadens, our concept of sex discrimination as prohibited by Title VII also broadens. With the combined force of Price Waterhouse and Oncale, some federal courts began to push the boundaries even further during the first decade of the 21st century.

By the time the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in 2012 in Macy v. Holder, a federal sector sex discrimination case, that a transgender plaintiff could pursue a Title VII claim against a division of the Justice Department, its opinion could cite a multitude of federal court decisions in support of that conclusion, including two Title VII decisions by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals involving public safety workers who were transitioning, and a 2011 ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that a Georgia state agency’s discrimination against an employee because she was transitioning violated the Equal Protection Clause as sex discrimination. There were also federal appellate rulings to similar effect under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Violence against Women Act, as well as numerous trial court rulings under Title VII. So the EEOC was following the trend, not necessarily leading the parade, when it found that discrimination against a person because of their gender identity was a form of sex discrimination.

After the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, striking down a state sodomy law under the 14th Amendment, and further rulings in 2013 and 2015 in the Windsor and Obergefell cases, leading to a national right to marry for same-sex couples, the persistence by many courts in asserting that Title VII did not prohibit sexual orientation discrimination appeared increasingly archaic. Just weeks after the Obergefell decision, the EEOC issued another landmark ruling in July 2015, David Baldwin v. Anthony Foxx, reversing half a century of EEOC precedent and holding that sexual orientation discrimination claims were “necessarily” sex discrimination claims covered by Title VII. The Commission ruled that a gay air traffic controller could bring a Title VII claim against the Department of Transportation, challenging its refusal to hire him for a full-time position at the Miami air traffic control center because of his sexual orientation.

Building on the Price Waterhouse, Oncale and Macy decisions, the EEOC embraced several alternative theories to support this ruling. One was the now well-established proposition that an employer may not rely on “sex-based considerations” or “take gender into account” when making employment decisions, unless sex was a bona fide occupational qualification – a narrow statutory exception that is rarely relevant to a sexual orientation or gender identity case.

“Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is premised on sex-based preferences, assumptions, expectations, stereotypes, or norms,” wrote the EEOC. “Sexual orientation as a concept cannot be defined or understood without reference to sex. Sexual orientation is inseparable from and inescapably linked to sex and, therefore, allegations of sexual orientation discrimination involve sex-based considerations.” By the summer of 2015, the agency was able to cite several federal trial court decisions applying these concepts in particular cases.

Another theory was based on the associational discrimination theory. Courts had increasingly accepted the argument that discrimination against a person because he or she was in an interracial relationship was discrimination because of race. The analogy was irresistible: Discriminating against somebody because they are in a same-sex relationship must be sex discrimination, because it involved taking the employee’s sex into account. Denying a job because a man is partnered with a man rather than with a woman means that his sex, as well as his partner’s sex, was taken into account by the employer in making the decision.

Finally, the Commission embraced the stereotyping theory that some courts had refused to fully embrace: that sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination because it necessarily involves discrimination based on gender stereotypes, not just those involving appearance, mannerisms, grooming, or speech, but also stereotypes about appropriate sexual attractions. Quoting a Massachusetts federal trial court ruling, the agency wrote, “Sexual orientation discrimination and harassment are often, if not always, motivated by a desire to enforce heterosexually defined gender norms. . . The harasser may discriminate against an openly gay co-worker, or a co-worker that he perceives to be gay, whether effeminate or not, because he thinks, ‘real’ men should date women, and not other men.” Professor Law’s theoretical proposition of 1988 was now surfacing in court and agency rulings a quarter century later.

The EEOC also rejected the view that adopting this expanded definition of sex discrimination required new congressional action, pointing out that the courts had been expanding the definition of sex discrimination under Title VII continually since the 1970s, with minimal intervention or assistance from Congress.

Since 2015 the issue of sexual orientation discrimination under Title VII has risen to the level of the circuit courts of appeals. In most of the circuits, there are precedents dating back decades holding that sexual orientation claims may not be litigated under Title VII. These precedents are softened in some circuits that have accept discrimination claims from gay men or lesbians who plausibly asserted that their visible departure from gender stereotypes provoked discrimination against them. But many of these appeals courts have strained to draw a line between the former and the latter, and have rejected stereotyping claims where they perceived them as attempts to “bootstrap” a sexual orientation claim into Title VII territory.

Ironically, one judge who emphatically rejected such a case several years ago with the bootstrapping objection, Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit, is the author of a concurring opinion in this new round of circuit court rulings in which he argues that it is legitimate for federal courts to “update” statutes without waiting for Congress in order to bring them into line with current social trends. This was part of the 7th Circuit’s en banc ruling in Kimberly Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, the April 4, 2017, decision that is the first by a federal appeals court to embrace all aspects of the EEOC’s Baldwin decision and hold that a lesbian could pursue a sexual orientation claim under Title VII. Posner’s argument echoes one made decades ago by Guido Calabresi, then a professor at Yale, now a judge on the 2nd Circuit, in a series of lectures published as a book titled “A Common Law for the Age of Statutes,” in which he argued that legislative inertia would justify courts in updating old statutes to meet contemporary needs. Although Posner did not cite Calabresi’s book, his argument is much the same. He quoted both Justice Scalia’s statement from Oncale and an earlier iteration of similar sentiments in an opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes from 1920, in which Holmes wrote: “The case before us must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.”

The federal circuit courts follow the rule that when a three-judge panel of the circuit interprets a statute, it creates a binding circuit precedent which can be reversed only by the full bench of the court in an en banc ruling, or by the Supreme Court, or by Congress changing the statute. The Hively ruling reversed a three-judge panel decision that had rejected the plaintiff’s Title VII claim based on prior circuit precedents. The vote was 8-3. Incidentally, 5 of the judges in the 8-member majority were appointees of Republican presidents. The employer in that case quickly announced that it would not seek Supreme Court review, but this ruling creates a split among the circuit courts, so it is only a matter of time before the Supreme Court receives a petition asking for a definitive interpretation of Title VII on this question.

The 7th Circuit opinion by Chief Judge Diane Wood accepted all of the EEOC’s theories from the Baldwin decision. Judge Wood concluded that “it would require considerable calisthenics to remove the ‘sex’ from ‘sexual orientation.’” “We hold that a person who alleges that she experienced employment discrimination on the basis of her sexual orientation has put forth a case of sex discrimination for Title VII purposes.”

Dissenting Judge Diane Sykes criticized the majority for deploying “a judge-empowering, common-law decision method that leaves a great deal of room for judicial discretion.” Here the battle is joined. For the majority, it is appropriate to trace the development of case law over decades, treating the concept of sex discrimination as evolving. For Judge Posner, concurring, it is legitimate for the court to set aside the pretense of ordinary interpretation and to “update” an old statute to reflect contemporary understandings. And for Judge Sykes, these are both illegitimate because it violates the division of authority between the legislature and the courts to adopt an “interpretation” that would be outside the understanding of the legislators who enacted the statute.

Now the scenario is playing out in other circuits. In recent weeks, the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit and the New York-based 2nd Circuit have issued panel rulings refusing to allow sexual orientation discrimination claims under Title VII. The panels did not consider the issue afresh and decided to reaffirm the old rulings on the merits, but rather asserted that they were powerless to do so because of the existing circuit precedents. In both of the cases decided in March, Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital and Christiansen v. Omnicom Group, the panels sent the cases back to the trial court to see whether they could be litigated as sex stereotyping cases instead of sexual orientation cases. But one judge dissented in the 11th Circuit, arguing that an old pre-Price Waterhouse precedent should not longer be treated as binding. The 2nd Circuit panel rejected the trial judge’s conclusion that because the gay plaintiff’s complaint included evidence that his treatment was tainted by homophobia he could not assert a sex stereotyping claim, and two members of the panel wrote a concurring opinion virtually accepting the EEOC’s view of the matter and suggesting that the circuit should reconsider the issue en banc.. In both cases, the panels took the position that sex stereotyping claims could be evaluated without reference to the sexual orientation of the plaintiff. And, in both of these cases, lawyers for the plaintiffs are asking the circuits to convene en banc benches to reconsider the issue, as a preliminary to seeking possible review in the Supreme Court. A different 2nd Circuit panel has also issued a ruling where sex stereotyping of the sort that is actionable in the 2nd Circuit is not part of the case, and counsel in that case is also filing a petition for en banc review.

One or more of these petitions is likely to be granted. While we may see more en banc rulings in favor of allowing sexual orientation discrimination claims, at some point a new circuit split may develop, leading inevitably to the Supreme Court. Or the issue could get to the Supreme Court by an employer seeking further review, since older rulings in other circuits still present the kind of circuit splits that the Supreme Court tries to resolve.

That leads to the highly speculative game of handicapping potential Supreme Court rulings. Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation restores the ideological balance that existed before Justice Scalia’s death. The Court as then constituted decided the historic same-sex marriage cases, Windsor and Obergefell, with Justice Kennedy, a Republican appointee, writing for the Court in both cases, as well as in earlier gay rights victories, Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas. These opinions suggest a degree of empathy for gay litigants that might lead Kennedy to embrace an expansive interpretation of Title VII. He is part of a generation of appellate judges appointed by Ronald Reagan during the 1980s who made up half of the majority in the recent 7th Circuit ruling: Richard Posner, Frank Easterbrook, Joel Flaum, and Kenneth Ripple. Another member of that majority, Ilana Rovner, was appointed by Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush. This line-up underlies optimism that Kennedy might join with the Clinton and Obama appointees on the Supreme Court to produce a five-judge majority to embrace the EEOC’s interpretation. Such optimism may also draw on Kennedy’s decisive rejection of the argument that legal rules are frozen at the time of their adoption and not susceptible to new interpretations in response to evolving social understandings. This was the underlying theme of his opinions in the four major gay rights decisions.

Since the 1970s supporters of gay rights have introduced bills in Congress to amend the federal civil rights laws to provide explicit protection for LGBT people. None of those attempts has succeeded to date. If the judicial battle reaches a happy conclusion, those efforts might be rendered unnecessary, although there is always a danger in statutory law of Congress overruling through amendment, but that seems unlikely unless the Republicans attain a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

On that optimistic note, I conclude with thanks for your attention, and I am happy to answer questions now.

 

7th Circuit Panel Rejects Lesbian Professor’s Title VII Claim

Posted on: July 29th, 2016 by Art Leonard No Comments

A three-judge panel of the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled on July 28 that a lesbian professor could not sue the local community college in South Bend, Indiana, for sexual orientation discrimination under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, rejecting her argument that anti-gay discrimination is a form of sex discrimination in violation of that law.  Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 13746, 2016 Westlaw 4039703.

 

Weighing in on a question that has taken on renewed vitality since last July, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a federal agency that enforces Title VII, ruled that David Baldwin, a gay air traffic controller, could bring an employment discrimination claim against the U.S. Transportation Department, the court, while describing the existing precedents in the 7th Circuit as “illogical,” nonetheless concluded that it was bound by those precedents.

 

Kimberly Hively began teaching part-time at Ivy Tech Community College in 2000. She applied six times for full-time positions for which she claimed to be qualified, but she was always turned down and her part-time contract was not renewed in July 2014.  By then, she had already filed a complaint with the EEOC on December 13, 2013, representing herself.  This was about 18 months before that agency changed its long-standing position and began to approve gay Title VII claims in the air traffic controller case.   The EEOC’s position, however, is not binding on federal courts.

 

Hively did not file a complaint with the South Bend human rights agency. Although that city’s anti-discrimination law was amended in 2012 to include sexual orientation, the city does not have jurisdiction to legislate about personnel practices at state-operated educational institutions, and they are explicitly exempted from coverage by the local law.  There is no Indiana state law forbidding sexual orientation discrimination.

 

After the EEOC concluded that it did not have jurisdiction, it sent Hively a “right to sue” letter. She filed her claim in federal court on August 15, 2014.  The college filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that sexual orientation discrimination claims are not covered under Title VII.  Hively, citing the advances of gay rights in the courts, urged that the college should not be allowed to discriminate based on sexual orientation.  On March 3, 2015, U.S. District Judge Rudy Lozano granted the college’s motion.   Citing a 7th Circuit decision from 2000 and a 2010 decision by the federal district court in Indiana, Judge Lozano wrote, “While this Court is sympathetic to the arguments made by Hively in her response brief, this Court is bound by Seventh Circuit precedent.  Because sexual orientation is not recognized as a protected class [sic] under Title VII, that claim must be dismissed.”

 

Hively also alleged a violation of 42 U.S.C. Section 1981, which Judge Lozano had to dismiss as well, because the Supreme Court interprets that 19th-century statute to apply only to race discrimination claims.  HiverlyivelyHi also asked to amend her complaint to push a claim for breach of contract, seeking enforcement of the college’s published non-discrimination policy, but that claim would arise under Indiana state contract law, and federal courts usually refuse to address state law claims when they have determined that the plaintiff has no federal law claim.

 

The fate Hively suffered in the district court shows the perils of individuals trying to navigate the complexities of federal employment law without legal representation. A well-versed lawyer might have found a way to construct a 14th Amendment Equal Protection claim on her behalf, which could be directed against individual school officials if she could allege sufficient facts to suggest that they refused to consider her applications because she is a lesbian, although there would be no guarantee of success because the Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether sexual orientation discrimination claims against public officials are entitled to heightened or strict scrutiny.

 

Attorney Gregory Nevins from Lambda Legal’s Atlanta office represented her on appeal to the 7th Circuit, where oral argument took place on September 30 and a long wait began for the court’s opinion.  The wait seemed surprising, because the three-judge panel would most likely easily conclude, as had Judge Lozano, that circuit precedent would dictate affirmance.  But the court took nine months to release its decision.  (By contrast, the 7th Circuit issued its marriage equality decision in 2014 less than two weeks after oral argument.)

 

Judge Ilana Rovner’s opinion obviously took so long because the majority of the panel was not content just to issue a pro forma dismissal in reliance on circuit precedent. The first, shorter, part of Rovner’s opinion, performing that function, was joined by Senior Judges William Bauer and Kenneth Ripple.  But the second, much longer, part, joined by Judge Ripple, provides a lengthy and detailed discussion of how the  EEOC’s Baldwin decision has led to an intense debate in the district courts around the country about how those old precedents are clearly out-of-step with where the country has moved on LGBT rights.

 

Judge Rovner (or, more likely, Lambda Legal in its appellate brief) collected district court decisions from all over the country – particularly from circuits where there were no adverse appeals court rulings – in which judges have decided to follow the EEOC’s reasoning and find that discrimination because of sexual orientation is “necessarily” sex discrimination.

 

The logical pathway to that conclusion runs through the Supreme Court’s 1989 ruling, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, which accepted the argument that discrimination against an employee because that employee fails to meet their employer’s sex-stereotypical views about how employees present themselves, is evidence of sex discrimination. That case involved a woman who was denied a partnership because she was perceived as inadequately feminine in her dress and conduct by partners who voted on the partnership decision.

 

Since 1989 some district courts have extended protection under Title VII to LGBT plaintiffs who could plausibly allege that they encountered discrimination because of sex stereotypes, but other courts have refused to take such cases, criticizing them as attempting to “bootstrap” coverage for sexual orientation into Title VII against the intent of Congress. What has emerged is a hodgepodge of decisions, resulting in the odd situation that, at least in some circuits, a gay plaintiff who is also obviously gender-nonconforming in terms of dress and speech may be protected under Title VII using the stereotyping theory, but a “straight-acting” gay plaintiff would have no protection.  Judge Rovner pointed out the irrationality of this, but, unfortunately, the 7th Circuit precedents seemed inescapable to this panel.

 

After discussing how various courts have pointed out the difficulties of distinguishing between a sex-stereotyping case and a sexual orientation case, she observed that the difficult is not necessarily impossible. “There may indeed be some aspects of a worker’s sexual orientation that create a target for discrimination apart from any issues related to gender,” she wrote.  “Harassment may be based on prejudicial or stereotypical ideas about particular aspects of the gay and lesbian ‘lifestyle,’ including ideas about promiscuity, religious beliefs, spending habits, child-rearing, sexual practices, or politics.  Although it seems likely that most of the causes of discrimination based on sexual orientation ultimately stem from employers’ and co-workers’ discomfort with a lesbian woman’s or a gay man’s failure to abide by gender norms, we cannot say that it must be so in all cases.  Therefore we cannot conclude that the two must necessarily be coextensive unless or until either the legislature or the Supreme Court says it is so.”

 

In this case, she pointed out, Kimberly Hively had not made any specific allegations of gender non-conformity, other than the implicit contention that being a lesbian, as such, was gender non-conforming in that she was attracted to women rather than men. Although a few district courts, especially after the Baldwin ruling, have found that to be enough to squeeze into coverage under the sex stereotype theory, the 7th Circuit hasn’t gotten there yet, and this panel did not feel empowered to extend circuit precedent to accept that argument.

 

While noting the significant advances in LGBT rights at the Supreme Court from Romer v. Evans (1996) through Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Judge Rovner pointed out that in none of those cases has the Supreme Court said anything that would deal directly with the question whether anti-gay discrimination must be treated as a form of sex discrimination under Title VII. But she did observe the stark legal anomaly created by last year’s marriage equality decision.

 

“The cases as they do stand, however, create a paradoxical legal landscape in which a person can be married on Saturday and then fired on Monday for just that act,” she wrote. “For although federal law now guarantees anyone the right to marry another person of the same gender, Title VII, to the extent it does not reach sexual orientation discrimination, also allows employers to fire that employee for doing so.  From an employee’s perspective, that right to marriage might not feel like a real right if she can be fired for exercising it.  Many citizens would be surprised to learn that under federal law any private employer can summon an employee into his office and state, ‘You are a hard-working employee and have added much value to my company, but I am firing you because you are gay.’  And the employee would have no recourse whatsoever – unless she happens to live in a state or locality with an anti-discrimination statute that includes sexual orientation.  More than half of the United States, however, do not have such protections.”

 

She pointed out the additional oddity that even a “straight” employee who was discharged because her employer mistakenly thought she was a lesbian would have no protection, unless she could show her overt violation of gender stereotypes aws the reason for the discrimination. Straight people are not protected from “mistaken” sexual orientation discrimination!

 

Judge Rovner observed that this state of the law “leads to unsatisfying results.” It also is inconsistent with Title VII race discrimination cases that impose liability when an employer fires a white employee because he or she is dating or marrying a person of a different race.  It is now well-established that it is race discrimination to single out somebody because of their interracial social life.  Why not, as a logical matter, prohibit discriminating against somebody because of their same-sex social life?  The logic seems irrefutable.  “It is true that Hively has not made the express claim that she was discriminated against based on her relationship with a woman,” wrote Judge Rovner, “but that is, after all, the very essence of sexual orientation discrimination.  It is discrimination based on the nature of an associational relationship – in this case, one based on gender.”

 

Rover found it “curious” that “the Supreme Court has opted not to weigh in on the question of whether Title VII’s prohibition on sex-based discrimination would extend to protect against sexual orientation discrimination” and that even in “the watershed case of Obergefell” the court “made no mention of the stigma and injury that comes from excluding lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons from the workforce or subjecting them to un-remediable harassment and discrimination.” But, frustratingly, the Supreme Court has yet to tackle head-on the direct issue of anti-gay discrimination in a way that would provide guidance to lower federal courts and state courts, and has so far consistently denied review in cases presenting this question.  “In addition to the Supreme Court’s silence,” she observed, “Congress has time and time against said ‘no’ to every attempt to add sexual orientation to the list of categories protected from discrimination by Title VII.”

 

Ultimately the judge was very critical of the 7th Circuit’s precedent.  “It may be that the rationale appellate courts, including this one, have used to distinguish between gender non-conformity discrimination claims and sexual orientation discrimination claims will not hold up under future rigorous analysis,” she wrote.  “It seems illogical to entertain gender non-conformity claims under Title VII where the non-conformity involves style of dress or manner of speaking, but not when the gender non-conformity involves the sine qua non of gender stereotypes – with whom a person engages in sexual relationships.  And we can see no rational reason to entertain sex discrimination claims for those who defy gender norms by looking or acting stereotypically gay or lesbian (even if they are not), but not for those who are openly gay but otherwise comply with gender norms.  We allow two women or two men to marry, but allow employers to terminate them for doing so.  Perchance, in time, these inconsistencies will come to be seen as denying practical workability and will lead us to reconsider our precedent.”  She then quoted Justice Kennedy’s Obergefell decision, pointing out how “new insights and societal understandings” could lead to changes in the law.

 

Rovner concluded that it was “unlikely” that society would tolerate this anomalous situation for long. “Perhaps the writing is on the wall,” she wrote.  “But writing on the wall is not enough.  Until the writing comes in the form of a Supreme Court opinion or new legislation, we must adhere to the writing of our prior precedent, and therefore, the decision of the district court is affirmed.”

 

This conclusion is not totally accurate.  The full 7th Circuit, considering this issue en banc, could decide to overrule the prior precedent within the circuit without waiting for passage of the Equality Act (which would amend Title VII to add sexual orientation and gender identity) or for a Supreme Court ruling.  Judge Rovner’s extended critique implies receptivity to rethinking the precedent, so perhaps a motion for rehearing en banc could find favor with a majority of the judges of the circuit.

 

A little “circuit math” suggests the possibility: There are nine active judges on the 7th Circuit, with two vacancies for which President Obama has made nominations that are stalled in the Senate.  Only one of the active judges was appointed by President Obama, David Hamilton, and two were appointed by President Clinton, Chief Judge Diane Wood and Ann Williams.  All the other judges are appointees of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.  (There is no appointee of George W. Bush sitting on the 7th Circuit.)

 

The three-judge panel in this case consisted entirely of Republican appointees: Judge Rovner by the first President Bush, Senior Judges Bauer and Ripple by Presidents Ford and Reagan. Interestingly, Ripple and Rovner, both Republican appointees with long service on the court, agree that the precedent is “illogical” and not “rational.”  Unfortunately, Judge Ripple, as a Senior Judge, would not participate in an en banc rehearing.  But perhaps despite the strong 6-3 overall Republican tilt of this circuit, a full nine-member bench might find a majority for granting en banc rehearing and changing the circuit precedent.  That would require at least one more Republican appointee to join Rovner and the three Democratic appointees to make a 5-4 majority.

 

One of the other Republican appointees, Richard Posner, could be the prime candidate for that. He wrote the 7th Circuit’s magnificent marriage equality decision, which reflected his strong receptivity to reconsidering his views on LGBT issues, a point he has subsequently reiterated in a law review article musing about his changing understanding of LGBT issues since he was appointed to the court by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

 

On the other hand, it is possible that this opinion took so long to get out because some attempt was made within the judges’ chambers to provoke a spontaneous en banc reconsideration , but it was unsuccessful.  Who knows?  Mysterious are the inner workings of our courts.