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Federal Court Dismisses Challenge to Religious Exemptions under Title IX

Posted on: January 15th, 2023 by Art Leonard No Comments

 

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits educational programs or activities that receive federal funds from excluding, denying benefits to, or subjecting to discrimination any person on the basis of sex.  Title IX includes a provision exempting from this anti-discrimination rule any educational institution that “is controlled by a religious organization” with “religious tenets” inconsistent with complying with Title IX.

 

In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County, a decision interpreting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that it is impossible to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or transgender status without discriminating “because of sex.”  In 2021, early in the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it would apply Bostock’s reasoning to interpret Title IX, and would accept complaints of discrimination from students of educational institutions that are subject to Title IX because they receive federal funds.  In 2020, the last year of the Trump administration, the Education Department adopted a regulation making it easier for religious schools to benefit from the exemption language in Title IX.  Prior to these new regulations, schools that wanted to claim the exemption to avoid DoE investigations had to file a written request to DoE to be determined to qualify for the exemption.  The 2020 regulations made such written applications optional, and said that religious educational institutions could raise the exemption to get an investigation dismissed without having made such a written request.

 

Responding to these developments, an organization called the Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP) was formed to bring a lawsuit on behalf of LGBTQ people who have discrimination claims against religious schools, seeking a declaration that the statutory exemption is unconstitutional and that the 2020 Trump administration regulation violates the Administrative Procedure Act.  The lawsuit against the Department of Education and the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, which was filed in the U.S. District Court in Oregon in March 2021, was ultimately expanded to include claims by forty LGBTQ+ individuals.  The Council for Christian Colleges & Universities and some other organizations intervened to defend the exemptions that they enjoy under Title IX.

 

The essence of REAP’s claim is that it is unconstitutional for the government to provide funding to religious colleges and universities that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

 

On January 12, 2023, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken granted a motion by the defendants and the intervenors to dismiss the lawsuit.  Hunter v. U.S. Department of Education, 2023 WL 172199, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 5745 (D. Ore., 1/12/23).

 

Although Judge Aiken rejected the defendants’ argument that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring their constitutional claims against DoE, which enforces Title IX, she accepted the defendants’ argument that the plaintiffs lack standing to assert their Administrative Procedure Act claim.

 

More to the point, however, Judge Aiken found that the Supreme Court has upheld statutory exemptions from compliance with federal laws by religious organizations, virtually foreclosing the Equal Protection and First Amendment claims asserted by the plaintiffs.  “Here, Plaintiffs have provided voluminous allegations going toward the element of disparate impact – the first hurdle to mounting an equal protection claim,” wrote Judge Aiken.  “However, Plaintiffs have submitted no allegations of discriminatory motivation on the part of those enacting the religious exemption.”

 

This is significant because the Supreme Court has held that the Equal Protection requirement extends only to intentional discrimination by the government.  “To the contrary,” wrote Aiken, “Plaintiffs argue that when Congress enacted Title IX [in 1972], protections against sexual and gender minorities – were ‘of no concern.’”

 

“Plaintiffs provide no evidence and supply no allegations … for the Court to consider and evaluate whether Congress was motivated in part by a discriminatory purpose when it enacted the religious exemption.  The Court cannot conclude that Plaintiffs’ assertion that ‘Congress enacted the religious exemption to permit discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity’ is sufficient.”  She deemed such statements to be “conclusory” and “therefore not entitled to an assumption of truth.”

 

The judge pointed out that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction covers Oregon, has ruled that statutes that are alleged to discriminate based on sexual orientation or gender identity are subject to “heightened scrutiny,” which means that the challenge will fail if the statute is found to “serve important government objectives” and “the discriminatory means employed are substantially related to the achievement of those objectives.”

 

“Plaintiffs have not alleged how the religious exemption fails intermediate scrutiny,” wrote Judge Aiken.  “Defendants point out that the Ninth Circuit has recognized ‘that free exercise of religion and conscience is undoubtedly, fundamentally important.’  Exempting religious controlled educational institutions from Title IX – and only to the extent that a particular application of Title IX would not be consistent with a specific tenet of the controlling religious organization — is substantially related to the government’s objective of accommodating religious exercise.”

 

The judge concluded that the plaintiffs’ substantive due process claim was too vague, commenting that “plaintiffs invoke only a vague reference to ‘due process’ violations, and do not set forth the elements of a substantive due process claim or facts supporting such a claim.”

 

Perhaps the strongest arguments for the plaintiffs would be their Establishment Clause argument – that granting the exemption shows government favoritism for religions that discriminate on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity, but the court found this argument to be foreclosed by the Supreme Court’s decisions upholding various religious exemptions for the purpose of accommodating an employer’s religious free exercise, including a provision in Title VII that exempts religious employers from the statute’s general prohibition on employment discrimination on the basis of religion.

 

The court concluded that the plaintiffs had not identified “legal authority that would distinguish this case from the facts and law at issue” in the Title VII cases.  Furthermore, she wrote, “Though Plaintiffs have much to say about Defendants [implementing the exclusion provision], Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate any impermissible purpose Congress had in enacting the religious exemption,” especially in light of the Supreme Court’s decisions upholding religious exemptions under other statutes.  Indeed, the court found, by exempting religious schools from Title IX, Congress could be said to be avoiding “excessive entanglement” between the government and religion by eliminating DoE investigations of discrimination claims against religious schools.

 

The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the religious school exemption somehow violated the First Amendment free speech rights of students by creating a “chilling effect” on student speech.  She found that the statute “contains no reference to speech or viewpoint…  Plaintiffs’ allegation that Defendants lack a compelling governmental interest in ‘funding private educational institutions that restrict First Amendment rights…’ asserts that it is the ‘institutions that restrict’ Plaintiffs’ rights.  In so alleging,” she continued, “Plaintiffs fail to supply any facts connecting Defendants’ provision of ‘funding’ to educational institutions with a free speech violation.  As such, Plaintiffs have not pled ‘factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.’”

 

Finally, the court rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the religious exemption violated their own right to free exercise of their religious beliefs in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  “The text of RFRA is clear that government granting exemptions does not constitute a violation, unless impermissible under Establishment Clause principles,” she wrote.

 

REAP must now decide whether to appeal this ruling to the Ninth Circuit.  In light of the Ninth Circuit precedents on which the court relied, winning an appeal is likely to be a long shot.

 

Judge Aiken was appointed to the district court by President Bill Clinton in 1998.

Washington Law Against Conversion Therapy Survives Constitutional Attack

Posted on: September 7th, 2022 by Art Leonard No Comments

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which included the first member of that bench appointed by President Donald Trump, unanimously ruled in Tingley v. Ferguson, 2022 WL 4076121 (September 6) that a circuit precedent from 2014, Pickup v. Brown, 740 F. 3d 1208, which rejected a constitutional challenge to California’s ban on conversion therapy for minors, is still a binding precedent in the 9th Circuit, thus affirming U.S. District Judge Robert J. Bryan’s decision (557 F.Supp.3d 1131 [W.D. Wash., 2021] to dismiss a challenge to a virtually identical law enacted in 2018 by the state of Washington.

The only real point of suspense in the case was what effect the panel might give to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 2018 in National Institute of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra, 138 S. Ct. 2361.  Three-judge panels of a circuit court of appeals are bound by past decisions of the circuit court unless they are reversed or superseded by an “en banc” decision (in the 9th Circuit an expanded panel of eleven judges) or by the U.S. Supreme Court.  The 2018 decision is usually referred to as the NIFLA case.

NIFLA operates a “pregnancy clinic” that counsels its clients not to resort to abortion.  It challenged a California statute that required licensed pregnancy clinics to inform clients that California law provides free or low-cost family planning services, including abortion.  NIFLA claimed that this requirement violated its free speech rights, compelling it to speak the state’s message rather than its own.  The 9th Circuit rejected that challenge, finding that the state could regulate “professional speech” as a distinct category of speech enjoying less protection under the 1st Amendment than other categories, such as political or artistic speech.

The Supreme Court reversed with an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, stating that “professional speech” was not less protected by the 1st Amendment than other forms of speech, and specifically criticizing decisions by the 3rd and 9th Circuits that had rejected free speech challenges to state laws designating performance of conversion therapy by licensed counselors as professional misconduct for which they could incur professional discipline.   Both of those cases had referred to “professional speech” as being less protected than other forms of speech.

In this new challenge to Washington’s law, licensed counselor Brian Tingley, who describes himself as a “Christian counselor” who attempts to get children to feel comfortable with their biological sex and to minimize homosexual attractions, sued with the representation of Alliance Defending Freedom, claiming that after the NIFLA decision, the 9th Circuit’s prior rulings on conversion therapy were no longer valid precedents.

District Judge Bryan disagreed, finding that the prior rulings had not depended solely on the “professional speech” theory.  Instead, the district court considered a regulation of health care practice to be concerned with conduct that incidentally involved speech, in which case the state could regulate the conduct to achieve an important governmental interest.  hat interest would be to protect minors from the adverse psychological and emotional effects of conversion therapy, which have been well-documented by numerous studies and led most professional associations in the health care field to condemn the practice.

The 9th Circuit panel agreed with Judge Bryan that the NIFLA opinion had not effectively overruled Pickup v. Brown or a subsequent case from California, Walsh v. Brown, that the Washington statute was virtually identical with the California statute that had been upheld, and that circuit precedent thus dictated that Tingley’s case be dismissed.

Judge Ronald M. Gould, writing for the panel, added a section to the opinion, speaking only for himself and Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, identifying an “additional reason” for reaching the conclusion that the Washington law is constitutional.  “The Supreme Court has recognized that laws regulating categories of speech belonging to a ‘long tradition’ of restriction are subject to lesser scrutiny.”  Looking back at the NIFLA ruling, he noted that Justice Thomas wrote that in the NIFLA case there was not “persuasive evidence of a long (if hereto unrecognized) tradition” of exempting speech by professionals from First Amendment protection.  However, Gould pointed out, there was a long tradition of the states regulating licensed health care practice.

“There is a long (if heretofore unrecognized) tradition of regulation governing the practice of those who provide health care within state borders,” he wrote, citing U.S. Supreme Court cases from 1889 and 1898 to make his point.  “And such regulation of the health professions has applied to all health care providers, not just those prescribing drugs.”  He also noted that the Supreme Court had in the past “relied upon the positions of the professional organizations Tingley criticizes, even when those positions have changed over time.”

Gould commented that “the evidence presented shows some difference in opinion about the efficacy and harm of conversion therapy, but the ‘preponderating opinion’ in the medical communicate is against its use.”

“That doctors prescribed whiskey in 1922, and thought of homosexuality as a disease in 1962, does not mean that we stop trusting the consensus of the medical community in 2022 or allow the individual desires of patients to overcome the government’s power to regulate medical treatments.”  And he pointed out that invalidating the conversion therapy ban because the “therapy” consisted of speech “would endanger other regulations on the practice of medicine where speech is part of the treatment.”  For example, he noted a Washington statute that prohibits doctors from promoting “for personal gain any unnecessary inefficacious drug, device, treatment, procedure or service.”  Such promotion would normally be done through speech.  Other sections of the law would subject to discipline the offering “to cure or treat diseases by a secret method,” and prohibit all advertising by health care professionals that is “false, fraudulent, or misleading.”

He also noted that the law was narrowly focused on licensed professionals, exempted unlicensed religious counselors, and clearly did not apply outside the confines of professional-client treatment relationships.  Counselors are free to state their views about conversion therapy, both to their clients and publicly, but are just forbidden to provide conversion therapy to clients.

As to Tingley’s separate claim that the law violates his free exercise of religion, the court concluded that  this was a religiously-neutral law of general applicability, and thus under existing Supreme Court precedent Tingley could not claim an exemption from complying based on his religious beliefs.   The court also rejected Tingley’s argument that the law was unconstitutionally vague, finding that past decisions had rejected the argument that “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” are terms whose meaning is uncertain.  “’Sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ have common meanings that are clear to a reasonable person,” wrote Judge Gould, “let alone a licensed mental health provider.”

Judge Mark Bennett, the Trump appointee on the panel, joined the majority opinion, but only to the extent that it found the question of constitutionality to be governed by the 9th Circuit precedents.  “Respectfully,” he wrote, “I believe that we should not hypothesize with dicta when our conclusion is commanded by binding precedent.”  Judges Gould and Wardlaw were appointed by President Bill Clinton.

Numerous amicus briefs were filed in this case, reflecting the heavy investment by the faith-based community in attempting to protect the practice of conversion therapy, especially by religiously-motivated licensed counselors, and the commitment by LGBTQ and other civil liberties groups to protect minors from a dangerous and exploitative practice.

Alliance Defending Freedom is likely to seek en banc review and, ultimately, to asking the Supreme Court to take up this case.  Judge Gould recognized in his opinion for the court that this ruling opens up a split with a recent opinion by the 11th Circuit, Otto v. Boca Raton, 981 F.3d 854 (2020), which struck down a municipal conversion therapy ban on the theory that conversion therapy that is limited to speech enjoys full 1st Amendment protection, rejecting the argument that it was a regulation of professional conduct only incidentally burdening speech.  The 11th Circuit took a different view of the impact of the Supreme Court’s NIFLA ruling, so it is possible that this case will provide ADF with the vehicle it is seeking to get the issue back before the Supreme Court.

Death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Removes a Staunch Advocate of LGBTQ Rights from the Supreme Court

Posted on: September 27th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020, age 87, having served on the Supreme Court of the United States since August 10, 1993.  Throughout her tenure on the Court she had been a staunch supporter of LGBTQ rights, joining all of the pro-LGBTQ rights majorities and dissenting from all of the adverse decisions except for two in which the Court was unanimous.

In 1993, she joined Justice David Souter’s opinion for the Court in Farmer v. Brennan, 511 U.S. 825 (1994), in which the Court ruled that a transgender inmate who was repeatedly subjected to sexual assault in prison could hold prison officials liable for damages under the 8th Amendment by showing that they knew the inmate faced “a substantial risk of serious harm” and the officials “disregard[ed] that risk by failing to take reasonable measures to abate it.”  Although three members of the Court wrote concurring opinions, Justice Ginsburg did not write in this case, then a new member of the Court.

In 1995, Justice Ginsburg joined the unanimous Court in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., 515 U.S. 557 (1995), holding that the Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade was an expressive association whose organizers had a right to exclude from their parade an organization whose message they did not want to include.  While holding that Massachusetts could not enforce its public accommodations law banning sexual orientation discrimination against the parade organizers, the Court affirmed that it was within the legislative and constitutional authority of the state to generally ban public accommodations from discrimination based on sexual orientation.  Justice Souter wrote for the Court.

In 1996, Justice Ginsburg joined the Court’s opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Jr., in Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), holding that Colorado violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by enacting a state constitutional amendment that prohibited the state or any of its subdivisions from protecting “homosexuals” from discrimination.  Justice Kennedy wrote that the state could not treat gay people as “strangers from the law” or categorically single gay people out for exclusion based on animus against homosexuality. The Court’s vote was 6-3, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas joining Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion.

Justice Ginsburg joined Justice Scalia’s opinion for the unanimous Court in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., 523 U.S. 75 (1998), which embraced a textualist interpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, reversing a decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that a man who was subjected to severe and pervasive harassment of a sexual nature by male co-workers in an all-male workplace could not bring a hostile work environment sex discrimination claim under that statute.  To the contrary, ruled the Court, nothing in the language of the statute suggested that so-called “same-sex harassment” was not actionable, so long as the plaintiff showed that he was harassed because of his sex.  Justice Scalia memorably wrote that even though “male-on-male sexual harassment in the workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it enacted Title VII, … 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.”  This mode of interpretation provided a foundation for the Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, 140 S. Ct. 1731 (2020), the last LGBTQ rights victory in which Justice Ginsburg participated.

In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000), the Court ruled 5-4 that the Boy Scouts of America enjoyed a 1st Amendment right to exclude gay men from serving as adult leaders of their Boy Scout troops.  Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for the Court in an opinion that drew upon Hurley as precedent.  Justice Ginsburg joined two dissenting opinions, one by Justice John Paul Stevens and the other by Justice David Souter.

Justice Ginsburg was part of the 6-3 majority that voted to hold that a Texas law penalizing “homosexual conduct” was unconstitutional as applied to private, consensual adult sexual activity.  Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).  Ginsburg joined the opinion for the Court by Justice Kennedy, which based its ruling on the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, and overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), which had rejected a Due Process challenge to Georgia’s sodomy law.  Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concurred in the judgement but would not vote to overrule Bowers (a case in which she had joined the Court’s opinion), rather premising her vote on Equal Protection.  Scalia dissented, in any opinion joined by Rehnquist and Thomas.

In 2006, Justice Ginsburg joined the unanimous opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc., 547 U.S. 47 (2006), rejecting a 1st Amendment claim by a group of law schools and law faculty members that their institutions should have a right to exclude military recruiters because of the Defense Department’s policy excluding gay people, among others, from the service.  Roberts premised the Court’s ruling on Congress’s power under Article I of the Constitution to “raise and support armies,” holding that Congress could constitutionally support this function by denying federal financial assistance to educational institutions that denied military recruiters the same access that they accorded to other recruiters under the so-called Solomon Amendment that Congress regularly attached to Defense appropriations bills.

Justice Ginsburg wrote for the Court in 2010 in Christian Legal Society v.  Martinez, 561 U.S. 661 (2010), rejecting a claim by students of the Christian Legal Society chapter at Hastings Law School that the school’s denial of official status to CLS because of its exclusionary membership policy violated the 1st Amendment.  The Court divided 5-4, with Justices Kennedy and Stevens issuing concurring opinions, from which it was reasonable to infer that Justice Ginsburg assembled her majority by seizing upon a factual stipulation entered at the district court that the school’s policy required that recognized student organizations allow all students to join, even though the wording of the policy prohibited discrimination based on enumerated characteristics, including sexual orientation, which was the “sticking point” with CLS.  Writing in dissent, Justice Samuel Alito angrily charged the court with failing to address the explicit policy that the school had adopted and then relied upon to withdraw recognition from CLS.  He argued that the Court was enabling viewpoint discrimination by the public law school.  Roberts, Scalia and Thomas joined the dissent.

In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, 573 U.S. 682 (2014), dissenting, Justice Ginsburg rejected the Court’s holding that commercial businesses could assert claims to being exempt from coverage requirements of contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act as an interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  In his opinion for the 5-4 majority, Justice Alito observed (in dicta) that an employer could not rely on religious freedom claims to defend against a race discrimination claim under Title VII.  In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg noted religious objections to homosexuality by some employers and questioned whether the Court would find that employers would have a right under RFRA statutes (patterned on the federal RFRA) to discriminate on that basis.  She specifically noted the case of Elane Photography v. Willock, in which the New Mexico Supreme Court had rejected a state RFRA defense by a wedding photographer being sued under the state’s public accommodations law, and in which the Supreme Court had recently denied a petition for certiorari, as well as a state law case from Minnesota involving a health club owned by “born-again” Christians who denied membership to gay people in violation of a local anti-discrimination law.

Justice Ginsburg joined opinions for the Court by Justice Kennedy in United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744 (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), both 5-4 rulings, in which the Court invoked concepts of Due Process and Equal Protection to invalidate Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (which prohibited federal recognition of same-sex marriages recognized by some states at that time), and to strike down state constitutional and statutory provisions denying same-sex couples the right to marry or recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states.  (As senior justice in the majority in both cases, Justice Kennedy assigned himself the opinions for the Court.)  As they were 5-4 decisions, Justice Ginsburg’s vote was necessary to the outcome in both cases.  Between the decision in Windsor and the decision in Obergefell, Justice Ginsburg became the first sitting member of the Court to officiate at a same-sex wedding ceremony, an action that led some to call for her recusal in Obergefell.

In Hollingsworth v. Perry, 570 U.S. 693 (2013), Justice Ginsburg joined Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion holding that the proponents of California Proposition 8, which had amended the state’s constitution to define marriage solely as the union of a man and a woman, lacked Article III standing to appeal the district court’s decision holding that measure unconstitutional, where the state had declined to appeal that ruling.  The Court’s opinion expressed no view as to the constitutionality of Proposition 8, focusing entirely on the question of standing, but its effect was to allow same-sex couples to resume marrying in California, which they had not been able to do from the effective date of Prop 8’s passage in November 2008.  Of course, Californian same-sex couples who subsequently married, as well as those who had married in the five-month period prior to the passage of Prop 8, benefited from federal recognition of their marriages under U.S. v. Windsor, which was issued by the Court on the same day as Hollingsworth.  Justice Kennedy dissented, in an opinion joined by Thomas, Alito and Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

In two subsequent per curiam rulings, Justice Ginsburg, who did not dissent, presumably joined in the Court’s disposition of the cases:

In 2016, the Court ruled per curiam in V.L. v. E.L., 136 S. Ct. 1017 (2016), that the courts of one state must accord full faith and credit to an adoption approved by the courts of another state where the court that approved the adoption had general jurisdiction over the subject of adoptions.  The case involved a second-parent adoption by the same-sex partner of the child’s birth mother in Georgia, where they were temporarily residing.  They moved back to Alabama and in a subsequent split-up, the birth mother urged Alabama courts to refuse to recognize the adoption, arguing that had it been appealed, the appellate courts in Georgia would have found it invalid.  There was no dissent from the U.S. Supreme Court per curiam, which asserted the Full Faith and Credit Clause requires state courts to recognize decisions by courts of other states who had jurisdiction to render those decisions under the laws of their states.

In 2017, the Court ruled per curiam in Pavan v. Smith, 137 S. Ct. 2075 (2017), that the state of Arkansas’s refusal to apply the spousal presumption to name the wife of a woman who gave birth to a child as a parent of the child on its birth certificate violated the 14th Amendment as construed by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges.  In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Alito and Thomas, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that the decision in Obergefell did not necessarily decide this case so the Court should have called for merits briefing and oral argument rather than deciding the case based on the cert documents.

In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 138 S. Ct. 1719 (2018), Justice Ginsburg wrote a dissent, joined by Justice Sotomayor, rejecting the Court’s decision to reverse the Colorado Court of Appeals and the state’s Civil Rights Commission in their ruling that a bakery violated the state’s civil rights law by refusing to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.  Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the Court in the 7-2 ruling was premised on the majority’s conclusion that the baker, who was relying on 1st Amendment free exercise and free speech arguments, had been denied a “neutral forum” for the decision of his case due to hostility to his religious views arguably expressed by two members of the Commission during the hearing process.  Justice Ginsburg observed in dissent that there was no evidence of a lack of neutrality on the part of the Colorado Court of Appeals, and she agreed with that court’s conclusion that application of the public accommodations law to the bakery did not violate the 1st Amendment.  In his opinion for the Court, Justice Kennedy noted Supreme Court precedent that generally private actors, such as businesses, do not have a 1st Amendment Free Exercise right to fail to comply with the requirements of state laws of general application that do not specifically target religious practices or beliefs.

Finally, in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia,140 S. Ct. 1731 (2020), noted above, Justice Ginsburg joined Justice Gorsuch’s opinion for the Court holding that discrimination in employment because of sexual orientation or transgender status is, at least in part, discrimination because of sex and thus actionable under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The vote in this case was 6-3, with dissenting opinions by Justice Alito, joined by Thomas, and by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.  In his dissent, Justice Alito asserted that the reasoning of the Court’s opinion would affect the interpretation of more than 100 provisions of federal law, which he listed in an appendix to his opinion.  The immediate effect of the opinion was to ratify the position of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which had earlier recognized its jurisdiction over such claims, and to extend protection against discrimination on these grounds to employees in the majority of states where state or local laws did not provide such protection, although private sector protection under Title VII is limited to employers with at least 15 employees, thus missing the majority of private sector employers.  This decision, which consolidated appeals from three circuits, presented the Court’s first merits ruling on a transgender rights case since Farmer v. Brennan (1993), noted above, although of course the marriage equality rulings, sub silentio, effectively overruled decisions by several state courts refusing to recognize marriages involving a transgender spouse that were challenged is being invalid “same-sex” marriages.

In her career prior to her Supreme Court and D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals service, Justice Ginsburg taught at Rutgers and Columbia Law Schools and was the founder and first director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project.  Litigation by that Project under her direction persuaded the Supreme Court in a series of important rulings beginning with Reed v. Reed in 1971 to recognize sex discrimination claims under the Equal Protection Clause, laying the doctrinal foundation for equal protection claims by LGBT litigants in later years.  Although she was seen as a moderate on many issues at the time of her appointment to the Court by President Bill Clinton, she went on to become a leader of the Court’s progressive wing and in the 21st century a frequent and very pointed dissenter as the center of gravity of the Court moved in a more conservative direction with the appointment of justices by George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.

Justice Ginsburg’s death left a Supreme Court vacancy less than two months before national elections for President and Congress.  Senate Republicans, who had blocked consideration of President Barack Obama’s nomination of D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Merrick Garland after Justice Scalia died in February 2016, arguing that a Supreme Court appointment should not be made in a presidential election year, now claimed that this was no bar to approving a replacement because the President and the incumbent Senate majority were of the same party.  President Trump announced his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on September 26.  Based on her record, if she is confirmed Judge Barrett would likely move the Court sharply to the right, with a 6-3 Republican-appointed conservative majority for the first time in generations, leading to discussion among Democrats about the possibility of expanding the Court if former Vice-President Joseph R. Biden is elected president and Democrats win a majority in the Senate.  Such a plan would require abolishing the filibuster rule by which a minority in the Senate can block a floor vote on legislation, unless the Republicans retained fewer than 40 seats as a result of the election and thus would be unable to block legislation under the filibuster rule without successfully recruiting some Democrats to join them.  Since the filibuster rule was repealed by a bare majority of the Senate in 2017 in order to confirm Justice Gorsuch in the face of a potential Democratic filibuster, it appeared likely at the time Trump announced his nomination that Judge Barrett will be confirmed, but the timing of a floor vote had not been announced by the end of September.

District of Columbia Court of Appeals Rules on Same-Sex Common Law Marriage Claim

Posted on: May 6th, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

“Brian Gill and Rodney Van Nostrand were in a romantic relationship and cohabited for several years beginning in 2004,” begins Judge Phyllis Thompson’s opinion for the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in Gill v. Van Nostrand, 2019 WL 1827998, 2019 D.C. App. LEXIS 159 (April 25, 2019).  “After their romantic relationship waned, and a few months after Mr. Van Nostrand had a ceremonial wedding in Brazil to another man he had met while on a lengthy work assignment in that country, Mr. Gill filed a complaint for legal separation from Mr. Van Nostrand, alleging that the two men are parties in a common law marriage that began in 2004.”  Van Nostrand’s denial that the men were common-law married led to a trial in D.C. Superior Court, resulting in a decision by Judge Robert Okun rejecting Gill’s claim.  Gill’s appeal of that ruling is the subject of the Court of Appeals’ April 25 ruling.  The District of Columbia Court of Appeals is the equivalent of a state supreme court for the District of Columbia.  Its rulings can be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Judge Thompson’s opinion goes to considerable length to explain why the court affirmed Judge Okun’s ruling, and to set out in some detail how District of Columbia trial courts should evaluate claims that same-sex couples had formed common law marriages prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015).  Although the District of Columbia legislated to allow same-sex marriage several years prior to Obergefell, the issue of whether same-sex couples could form such marriages in the District, one of a handful of U.S. jurisdictions that still recognize same-sex marriages, depends on retroactive application of Obergefell’s holding that same-sex couples enjoy a fundamental right to marry as an aspect of liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause.  In the case of D.C., of course, the relevant Due Process Clause would be that in the 5th Amendment of the Bill of Rights, whereas the Due Process Clause upon which the Court relied in Obergefell was that in the 14th Amendment, binding on the states.

The D.C. Court of Appeals agreed with Judge Okun that the fundamental right identified by the Supreme Court in Obergefell did apply to the marital aspirations of same-sex couples at the time in question (2004).  The issue is how to decide whether a particular couple was in a common law marriage, when the District’s relevant case law was stated, in large part, in ways pertaining to different-sex couples whose right to marry at the time was legally recognized, as such a right was not then recognized for same-sex couples.  At an early stage in this case, Judge Okun refused Van Nostrand’s motion to dismiss the case, stating “that a party in a same-sex relationship must be given the opportunity to prove a common law marriage, even at a time when same-sex marriage was not legal.”  This led to the trial, in which Van Nostrand testified that he never considered himself to be married to Mr. Gill, and Mr. Gill testified about an exchange of rings, a pledge of monogamy, and his belief that they considered themselves effectively married, if not legally so.

Under District of Columbia precedents, “the elements of common law marriage in this jurisdiction are cohabitation as husband and wife, following an express mutual agreement, which must be in word of the present tense.”  Quoting Coleman v. United States, 948 A.2d 534 (D.C. Ct. App. 2008).  What that means is the people can’t just “drift” into a common law marriage in D.C.  There must be a mutual express agreement, and it can’t just be an agreement that sometime in the future the couple will get married; it must be a present statement of agreeing to live as a married couple, albeit without the formalities of a marriage license and ceremony by a governmentally authorized officiant.  Normally a preponderance of the evidence standard would apply, but depending on the circumstances the court might apply a “clear and convincing evidence” standard, which the court found applicable in this case, where Gill is trying to prove a common law marriage with a man who is legally married to another man.  (The court noted that the clear and convincing evidence standard has been used by D.C. courts in the past when somebody is trying to prove that they have a common law marriage with somebody who is legally married to somebody else.)

“We shall assume arguendo that serious constitutional issues would arise if the trial court’s analysis of common-law marriage operated to the peculiar disadvantage of Mr. Gill and Mr. Van Nostrand as a same-sex-couple, i.e., required them to meet expectations that they as a same-sex couple could meet only with more difficulty than opposite-sex couples would encounter,” wrote Judge Thompson.   “Such an approach is arguably warranted in order to accord same-sex couples who have chosen to share their lives in a union comparable to traditional marriage ‘the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage,” quoting Strauss v. Horton, 46 Cal. 4th 364 (Cal. 2009), a decision in which the California Supreme Court ruled that marriages of same-sex couples who were married in California prior to the passage of Proposition 8 would have exactly the same status as all legally-contracted marriages in that state.

The trial court focused on six factors in its analysis in concluding that Gill and Nostrand did not have a common law marriage.

First was the failure of either man, but particularly Mr. Gill, to remember the date on which Gill claimed they exchanged rings that they agreed to wear for the duration of their relationship.  Gill testified that he “decided to surprise Mr. Van Nostrand by purchasing two rings and presenting them to Mr. Van Nostrand along with M& M candies inscribed with “Will you marry me?”  Gill testified that he got down on one knew and proposed to Mr. Van Nostrand, who said yes and allowed Gill to slip one of the rings on his finger.  Van Nostrand denied various particulars of this testimony, and there was no testimonial agreement about the date on which this purportedly occurred. The court found Gill’s testimony, which goes to the crucial question of whether there was an express agreement to be married, as “exceptionally vague,” although, by contrast, Gill remembered precisely both their first date and the first time they had sex with each other.  “The court reasoned that ‘the date on which parties agree to be married surely would be at least as memorable [as], if not more memorable . . . than the date on which’ the parties first had sexual relations ‘or first had a “real date” at a restaurant,’” wrote Thompson.  Gill criticized the judge’s “overreliance” on this factor, but the appeals court did not consider this “unfairly prejudicial” or improperly expecting the parties “to meet expectations of traditional marriage that they, as a same-sex couple, could meet only with difficulty.”  Since the date in question is the date when Gill claims to have proposed marriage, proffered a ring, and received an affirmative response from Von Nostrand, the court found failure to remember the date was not an “unreasonable factor to consider,” taking into account that it was not the only or dispositive factor, merely one of several.

Secondly, the trial court found that neither of the men “told their friends or family about the alleged marriage (or perhaps more correctly, the alleged ‘entry into a commitment comparable to marriage’) and the couple did not commemorate it with a ceremony or celebrate it by going on a honeymoon.”  The court did find that at that time both parties’ families had “harsh anti-gay views” which could explain why there was no contemporaneous communication to them about this topic, and the court acknowledged that “same-sex couples, prior to the legalization of same-sex marriage, might have been less likely to have a public ceremony or honeymoon,” but, pointed out Thompson, the question was “how these parties and their friends in the gay community marked or signified important events in their romantic lives,” and evidence was lacking as to that.  Traditionally, “holding out” as married to one’s relevant community is an important signifier of common law marriage, and there was nothing stopping a same-sex couple from taking a honeymoon trip to celebrate their new relationship.  Gill attempted to show that a European trip the men took in 2005 was their “honeymoon,” but Van Nostrand testified to the contrary.

Furthermore, there was evidence that Van Nostrand was partial to “celebrating events in a flamboyant manner,” as shown by his marriage to Weller da Silva, the Brazilian man whom he legally married in April 2014.  Related Thompson, “Mr. Van Nostrand delivered the proposal while the pair were in a hot-air balloon over the Serengeti, created an album commemorating the proposal, told family members and friends, med Mr. da Silva’s family, and, after the two were married, went on a honeymoon trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.”  (Sounds fab!!)  The trial court credited Van Nostrand’s testimony that “he would not have entered into a marriage with [Gill] without commemorating such an event with … pomp and circumstance” and the evidence showed that Van Nostrand had the financial ability to sustain such activities, as shown by the “shared history of foreign travel” of the two men during their relationship.

The third factor was that the parties “never inscribed their rings,” a step that Van Nostrand credibly testified they would have done had they considered themselves married.  The court also noted that when marriage became available in Massachusetts, Van Nostrand asked Gill whether he wanted to go there to get married and Gill said no.  He also testified that he asked Gill about having their rings inscribed, but Gill declined, and also declined to enter into a registered domestic partnership, which became available in D.C.  Furthermore, D.C. enacted marriage equality in 2010, but the men did not take the step of formalizing their relationship as a marriage then.  Gill criticized the trial court’s reliance on this factor, but the court found that Van Nostrand credibly testified that these were “the steps he would have taken to symbolize and validate that the parties’ relationship had advanced to a mutual commitment comparable to marriage.”  Here, the court referred to a ruling last year by the Colorado Court of Appeals, Hogsett v. Neale, 2018 WL 6564880, which placed some weight on the failure of a lesbian couple to go out of state to get married as a factor in determining that they did not have a common law marriage under Colorado law.

The fourth factor was that “the parties maintained largely separate finances.”  The house in which they lived together from 2005 was only in Van Nostrand’s name, they had no joint bank accounts or credit card accounts, and even though they discussed creating wills, powers of attorney, and so forth, only Van Nostrand made and executed such documents.  The trial court observed that “although [Gill] was supposed to draft documents giving [Van Nostrand] these same benefits and responsibilities, he failed to do so.”  By contrast, shortly after Van Nostrand married da Silva, they established joint bank accounts and executed wills, powers of attorney and the like.  (A docket search shows that sometime after his marriage to da Silva, Van Nostrand sought to evict Gill from the D.C. home, resulting in litigation in which Gill sought, without success, injunctive relief against the eviction, before a different D.C. trial judge. There is no published opinion, and Judge Okun’s decision in this case is apparently not published, either.)

The fifth factor was Gill’s failure to object or to claim he was in a common law marriage with Van Nostrand when he was informed that Van Nostrand planned to marry da Silva in Brazil.  Gill’s response to this news was not to state that they needed to get divorced first in order for that marriage to take place.  He raised the issue “only after realizing that this would affect” his beneficiary status in terms of Van Nostrand’s employee benefits.  As the court pointedly notes, he seemed to have sprung into action when he was removed from coverage under Van Nostrand’s employment-related health insurance.  He went to an attorney and apparently first learned about the possibility of claiming a common law marriage at that point.  “Mr. Gill asserts that he reacted as he did because he was not aware that the parties’ relationship gave him legally enforceable rights vis-à-vis Mr. Van Nostrand,” observed the court.  The court of appeals found this to be “understandable” as the parties are not lawyers, and the trial court did not deem this as a determinative factor in the analysis.  However, wrote Thompson, “we think the trial court exercised reasonable skepticism in light of Mr. Gill’s financial incentive to claim that the parties had a common-law marriage.  Courts have long ‘regarded common-law marriage as a fruitful source of fraud and perjury,’” quoting In re Estate of Danza, 188 App. Div. 2d 530, 591 N.Y.S. 2d 197 (1992).

Finally, the sixth factor concerns the growing body of court decisions about retroactive common law marriage claims, and particularly a case in which a Pennsylvania trial court did find a common law marriage, In re Estate of Carter, 159 A.3d 970 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2017).  Carter presented ideal facts to find a same-sex common law marriage.  There was a marriage proposal and a diamond ring that Mr. Hunter gave Mr. Carter on Christmas Day 1996, a day easy to remember and prove. Mr. Carter then gave Hunter an engraved diamond ring on February 18, 1997, with the date inscribed, and the men faithfully observed that date as their anniversary for 16 years until Carter’s death.  They had joint banking and investment accounts, owned their home together with a joint mortgage, had mutual wills and powers of attorney, and referred to each other as spouses.  While Judge Okun disclaimed requiring that all these factors be satisfied in order to find a common law marriage for a same-sex couple formed prior to the legalization of same-sex marriages, he reasoned that Gill’s “failure to prove any of these factors substantially undercuts his effort to prove the existence of a common law marriage.”  In this case, Judge Okun found that the men had at best “an agreement to get married at some point in the future.” Wrote Thompson, “We cannot say that the trial court’s reliance on Carter as persuasive authority and its resultant analysis were legally or factually erroneous.”

In conclusion, wrote Thompson, “For all the foregoing reasons, we are satisfied that the evidence did not compel the trial court to conclude that the parties had an express mutual agreement to be permanent partners with the same degree of commitment as the spouses in a ceremonial marriage.  The evidence permitted the court to conclude, as it did, that the parties never expressly agreed to be married, in the present tense.”  And that decides the case consistent with D.C. case law.

Gill is represented by Aaron Marr Page and Christopher J. Gowen.  Jack Maginnis represents Van Nostrand.  As noted, this ruling could be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.  Federal question jurisdiction is not required for an appeal from the D.C. local courts on questions of D.C. common law, but if it were, this case arguably presents an underlying constitutional question concerning the jurisdiction’s obligation to recognize the fundamental rights of same-sex couples to enter into common law marriages, and the question whether the trial court’s analysis did not adequately respect that right could still be argued on appeal.  However, Judge Thompson took great lengths to reiterate the D.C. Court of Appeals’ view that the court had to take account of contemporary circumstances pre-Obergefell in avoiding unfairly prejudicing the question by imposing unreasonable expectations on how same-sex couples intended to form a common law marriage would have acted in 2004, and that the trial court had done that adequately in this case.

Appellate Courts Rule on Discrimination Against Gay Jurors

Posted on: May 7th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

 

On May 3, two appellate courts issued rulings on appeals of criminal convictions in which gay men in the jury pool were dismissed on “peremptory challenges” by the prosecuting attorneys.  The California 3rd District Court of Appeal decided that the defendant in People v. Douglas, 2018 Cal. App. LEXIS 403, a gay man, is entitled to a new trial.  The Nevada Supreme Court ruled in Morgan v. State, 2018 Nev. LEXIS 31, 134 Nev. Adv. Rep. 27, against the defendant’s appeal.  While both courts agree that striking jurors from a panel just because they are gay violates the constitution, they adopted different approaches to the issue.

Brady Dee Douglas’s former boyfriend, described in the opinion for the California court by Justice Elena J. Duarte as “a male prostitute,” told Douglas that a man, identified in the opinion as Jeffrey B., had “shorted him money following a prearranged sexual encounter.  Douglas and another man “tracked down Jeffrey and demanded payment,” but Jeffrey fled.  The men gave chase.  “During a high-speed freeway chase, [Douglas] pointed a gun at Jeffrey and shot at his car several times.”  The court does not mention how Douglas and his confederate came to be arrested.

Douglas was prosecuted on multiple charges and convicted by the jury.  The trial judge sentenced him to six years in prison.  Appealing his conviction, he objected that the trial judge allowed the prosecutor to strike the only two openly gay men in the juror pool using peremptory challenges.  During the jury selection process, parties can move to strike potential jurors “for cause” by convincing the judge that the juror could not fairly decide the case.  In California, each party is allowed to excuse a certain number of jurors without providing any explanation – called a peremptory challenge – but the other party can object if it appears that the challenger is engaging in unconstitutional discrimination based on the juror’s race, sex or sexual orientation.

Douglas’s lawyer objected to the peremptory challenges to the gay jurors.  The trial judge asked why they were being challenged. The prosecutor said he challenged one man because he had a close friendship with a public defender (a lawyer employed in defending indigent people charged with crimes) who had told the juror that she considered prosecutors to be on “the dark side.”  The other man was challenged based on his demeanor during voir dire, the prosecutor noting that the man leaned forward and seemed attentive when defense lawyers were speaking but leaned back and gave short and non-descriptive answers when the prosecutor was speaking.

Then the prosecutor added, as to both of them, “In addition, in a case in which the victim in the case is in a relationship and is not in a relationship with a female but is not out of the closet and actually was untruthful with the police about the extent of his relationship with a male prostitute, I think that that particular person’s testimony may be viewed with bias by those who are willing to be openly gay and not – not lie about it and can be frank about it, and he would view that as a negative character trait, and an individual who attempts to maintain given whatever grave idea, sexuality he has, but is willing to lie about it.  So I think there is a number of reasons, both specific to the case that are sexuality neutral, not – I’m not asserting in any way that is an adequate basis for a Wheeler motion, but even given that I think there are bases not only in their reaction in court to answering questions, but also given the specific facts of this case.”  The quote above is from the transcript made during jury selection, which suggests the prosecutor is verbally challenged or the court reporter had trouble keeping up with the statement.  A Wheeler motion relates to a California Supreme Court opinion, People v. Wheeler, 22 Cal. 3d 258 (1978), concerning objections to peremptory challenges.  Clearly, the prosecutor assumed that openly gay men would be biased against a closeted gay witness (Jeffrey B.) who patronized escorts.

The defense attorney responded that “under that justification, anyone who is openly gay” would automatically be challenged, and the lawyers for both defendants formally objected.  The trial court denied the defense’s objection to the peremptory challenges, and excused the two gay men from the jury pool, after finding that the prosecutor’s objections to the two gay men were non-discriminatory justifications.  “In effect,” wrote Justice Duarte, “that was the rough equivalent to applying a mixed-motive analysis to the challenges,” although not entirely so because that trial judge had questioned “in passing whether a Wheeler motion based on sexuality discrimination was appropriate.”

In a prior ruling on Douglas’s appeal, this panel of the Court of Appeal sent the case back to the trial court, confirming that a Wheeler motion based on sexuality discrimination is appropriate, and directing the trial judge to reconsider whether these jurors should have been dismissed.  If not, a new trial would be needed. But Douglas petitioned for a reconsideration by the Court of Appeal, arguing that a mixed-motive analysis is inappropriate on a Wheeler motion, and that the verdict should be vacated and a new trial ordered because it was clear that the prosecutor challenged the jurors because they are openly gay.

The Court of Appeal agreed to reconsider its ruling, and amicus briefs were submitted by Equality California, Lambda Legal, and National Center for Lesbians Rights, and the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office.

In a rare move, the three-judge panel changed its mind and decided, by a vote of 2-1, that a mixed-motive analysis is improper in such a situation, so the conviction must be vacated.

Justice Duarte summarized the decision simply: “This case is about fairness and equality in our criminal justice system.  When a party exercises a peremptory challenge against a prospective juror for an invidious reason, the fact that the party may also have had one or more legitimate reasons for challenging that juror does not eliminate the taint to the process.  We reject the application in these circumstances of the so-called “mixed motive” or “dual motive” analysis, which arose in employment discrimination cases as a way for defendant-employers to show that they would have taken an adverse action against a plaintiff-employee whether or not an impermissible factor also animated the employment decision.  We hold it is not appropriate to use that test when considering the remedy for invidious discrimination in jury selection, which should be free of any bias.”

In this case, the prosecutor assumed that openly gay men as jurors would be biased against the victim, a closeted man who hired escorts, when the defendant was an openly gay man.  By this thinking, any openly gay man, even if he swore during voir dire that he could be unbiased, would be presumed to be biased and excused from the jury.  This is exactly the kind of thinking that the U.S. Supreme Court was combatting in the leading case of Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986), where it condemned the practice of prosecutors using peremptory challenges to keep African-Americans off juries in cases involving African-American parties.  This issue isn’t just one of fairness as between the parties, but also fairness to the potential jurors. The Supreme Court observed that people called to jury duty should not suffer discrimination based on bias and stereotypes about them.  Citizens have an equal right to serve on juries, regardless of their race or, as the California courts have held, their sexual orientation.

Associate Justice Harry Hull, Jr., argued in his dissenting opinion that the mixed-motive analysis was the correct one, that the defendant was tried “before an impartial judge and found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by an unbiased jury while represented by competent counsel.”  He objected to the idea of vacating this verdict where, according to him, “the record is devoid of any evidence showing the non-neutral reason was determinative in striking the prospective jurors or that the two facially valid reasons were unsupportable.

Of course, vacating the verdict is not the end of the case, since the prosecutor can retry the defendant.

In the Nevada case, a criminal prosecution in which the defendant was African-American, sexual orientation was not really an issue.  However, the defense objected to the prosecution’s use of a peremptory challenge that kept a gay man off the jury after he had expressed approval of media criticism of the police in their dealings with African-Americans.  The prosecution relied on this comment to justify its peremptory challenge, but the defense argued that heterosexual jurors who expressed similar views had not been excused from the panel.

The Nevada Supreme Court ruled that the trial judge had correctly overruled the defendant’s challenge to the removal of the gay juror.  However, before stating that conclusion Chief Justice Michael Douglas wrote for the court, “Before addressing Morgan’s contention that the district court erred in  overruling his Batson challenge based on sexual orientation, we take this opportunity to first address whether sexual orientation should be recognized under Batson – a novel issue before this court.  In answering in the affirmative, we align this court with the Ninth Circuit.”

The reference is to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled in a 2014 case that as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, it appeared to the 9th Circuit judges that the Supreme Court was treating sexual orientation discrimination as meriting “heightened scrutiny” in equal protection cases.  This is, in fact, the test for whether a party can challenge discrimination in the jury selection process.  If it appears that a party is trying to eliminate jurors due to a characteristic that gets heightened scrutiny in a constitutional discrimination case, the other party can bring a Batson challenge, and the reasons for striking the juror become a subject of inquiry for the court.

The Nevada Supreme Court found the 9th Circuit’s reasoning persuasive, particularly noting that this was not just a question of fairness for the litigants but also for prospective jurors, quoting the 9th Circuit opinion, which stated that “strikes exercised on the basis of sexual orientation continue this deplorable tradition of treating gays and lesbians as undeserving of participation in our nation’s most cherished rights and rituals.” Such strikes “deprive individuals of the opportunity to participate in perfecting democracy and guarding our ideals of justice on account of a characteristic that has nothing to do with their fitness to serve.”

Turning to the peremptory challenge in this case, the court held that the trial judge was correct to allow it over the defense’s objection.  As in the Douglas case, there were two jurors in the pool for Morgan’s case who revealed by their answers during voir dire that they were gay.  But the prosecutor challenged only one of them, and the prosecutor did not bring a peremptory challenge to the other gay juror.  “Accordingly, there is no pattern of strikes against gay members, and no disparate treatment of gay members,” wrote Chief Justice Douglas.  Furthermore, he noted, “the nature of Morgan’s criminal case did not involve an issue sensitive to the gay community.  Therefore, because we are not convinced that the totality of the circumstances gave rise to an inference of discrimination, Morgan failed to make out a prima facie case of discrimination.”  The prosecutor had also given an explanation having nothing to do with the juror’s sexual orientation, the juror’s approval of media criticism of the police, and the court found this a satisfactory reason, noting that some heterosexual jurors may have voiced criticisms, but they were not as strongly stated as by the gay potential juror.

It is possible that the California Court of Appeals would have agreed with the Nevada Supreme Court’s handling of the case, since the Nevada ruling did not embraced a mixed-motive analysis, but instead concluded that there was no basis to infer that the challenged juror’s sexual orientation had anything to do with the prosecution’s decision to keep him off the jury.

U.S. Supreme Court Denies Petition to Review Texas Supreme Court Ruling in Houston Benefits Case

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

On December 4 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected without explanation a petition from the City of Houston seeking review of the Texas Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling in Pidgeon v. Turner, which had cast doubt on whether the City was obligated under Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 marriage equality ruling, to provide same-sex spouses of Houston employees the same employee benefits offered to different-sex spouses.

A decision by the Supreme Court to deny review of a case is not a ruling on the merits of the case. In this case, it most likely means that there were not at least four members of the Court, the number required under the Court’s rules to grant a petition for review, who thought the Court should intervene in a lawsuit that is ongoing in the state trial court.  The Court’s action should not be construed as a decision approving the Texas Supreme Court’s ruling.  It is consistent with the Court’s tight control of its docket, under which sharply limits the number and type of cases that it takes up for review and rarely inserts itself into a case that has not received a final disposition in the lower courts.

Retired Texas Supreme Court Justice Wallace B. Jefferson and his law firm, Alexander Dubose Jefferson & Townsend LLP, filed the petition on behalf of Mayor Sylvester Turner and the City of Houston on September 15, several weeks after Lambda Legal had filed a new federal district court lawsuit on behalf of some Houston employees whose same-sex spouses are receiving benefits and who fear losing them in the state court litigation. Lambda’s suit was quickly dismissed by the federal trial judge as not “ripe” for review because the plaintiffs are receiving their benefits and it was likely, in the judge’s view, that the state trial court would rule that the benefits were legal in light of the current state of the law.

The Texas Supreme Court’s June 30 decision, which reversed a ruling by the Texas Court of Appeals, was not a final disposition of that case, instead sending it back to the trial court in Harris County for a hearing on the original claim by plaintiffs Jack Pidgeon and Larry Hicks, Republican anti-gay activists, that the City had unlawfully extended employee benefits eligibility to same-sex spouses of City employees in 2013.

Pidgeon and Hick first started litigating against the City when then-Mayor Annise Parker extended benefits eligibility by executive action after receiving an opinion from the city attorney about the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 26, 2013, ruling, U.S. v. Windsor, which struck down part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Pidgeon and Hicks argued that under Texas statutory and constitutional law at the time, it was illegal for the City to extend the benefits, as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Windsor decision did not address the constitutionality of state laws banning same-sex marriage.

Pidgeon and Hicks had a plausible argument in 2013, enough to persuade the trial judge to issue a preliminary injunction against the City, which promptly appealed. The Court of Appeals sat on the appeal for a few years, waiting for the storm of marriage equality litigation in Texas and throughout the country to play out.  Less than a year after the Windsor decision, a federal trial judge in San Antonio ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, but the state’s appeal languished in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals until after the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Obergefell case on June 26, 2015.  A few days later the 5th Circuit affirmed the trial court’s ruling invalidating the Texas laws banning same-sex marriages.  Then the Texas Court of Appeals reversed the preliminary injunction, instructing the trial court to decide the case in accord with the 5th Circuit’s ruling.  The City then resumed providing the benefits, which it has continued to do.

Undaunted, Pidgeon and Hicks asked the Texas Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeals decision, arguing that the Court of Appeals erred by instructing the trial court to follow the 5th Circuit’s ruling because, as a technical matter, state courts are not bound by federal court of appeals rulings.  They argued, in effect, that the City was still bound to abide by the Texas state law banning recognition of same-sex marriages for purposes of public employee benefits, which had never been invalidated in the state courts and, they argued, was technically not declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, whose opinion in Obergefell only directly struck down state marriage bans in the states of the 6th Circuit, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

After lengthy deliberation, the Texas Supreme Court announced in September 2016 that it would not consider Pidgeon and Hicks’ appeal. This prompted a fervent campaign by Governor Greg Abbott and other elected officials to persuade the court to change its mind, stimulating thousands of Texans to flood the court with demands that it reverse the Court of Appeals decision.  The court ultimately bowed to this pressure, granted review, and issued its June 30 decision.

The Texas Supreme Court agreed that the Texas Court of Appeals should not have treated the 5th Circuit’s decision as binding on the trial court, and opined further that the Obergefell decision was just about whether same-sex couples could marry as a question of federal constitutional law, not what benefits they were entitled to if they married.  This was palpably wrong, as shown by another Supreme Court ruling, just days prior, in Pavan v. Smith, a case from Arkansas involving parental names on birth certificates, in which the Court made clear that married same-sex couples are entitled to the “full constellation of rights” that go with marriage under the Obergefell decision.

At present Pidgeon and Hicks’ lawsuit is still pending in the state trial court and the same-sex spouses of Houston employees are receiving their equal benefits, so it is likely that the Supreme Court justices saw no pressing reason to add this case to their docket. Perhaps they agree with the opinion by U.S. District Judge Vanessa D. Gilmore, who, in dismissing Lambda’s lawsuit, in predicted that the state trial court, being bound to follow U.S. Supreme Court precedent in Obergefell and Pavan, will ultimately reject the challenge to the benefits.

West Virginia Supreme Court Sharply Split on State Hate Crimes Law Interpretation

Posted on: May 15th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

A sharply-divided West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals voted 3-2 on May 9 to reject the application of the state’s Hate Crimes Law to the criminal prosecution of Steward Butler, who reacted to two gay men kissing each other on a sidewalk in Huntington, West Virginia, in the early hours of April 5, 2015, by exiting his car and slugging both men in the face. State v. Butler, 2017 WL 1905948, 2017 W. Va. LEXIS 333 (May 9, 2017).

W.Va. Code Section 61-2-9(c), which was enacted in 1987, makes it a felony to willfully injure somebody because of their “race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation or sex.” According to the opinion for the majority of the court by Chief Justice Allen H. Loughry, II, since 1987 members of the legislature have introduced 26 bills to amend the law to add “sexual orientation” to the list, but none has succeeded.

Butler was positively identified as the perpetrator because one of the victims managed to record part of the assault on his cellphone. “That video recording,” wrote the court, “as well as the statements taken from the defendant’s companions, were used to identify the defendant as the alleged perpetrator.”  The Cabell County prosecutor presented the case to a grand jury, which charged Butler with two counts of battery and two violations of the Hate Crimes Law.  Butler moved to dismiss the Hate Crimes counts, arguing that the statute did not apply to assaults motivated by the sexual orientation of the victim.

Circuit Judge Paul T. Farrell granted Butler’s motion, dismissing the hate crime counts. He found that “sex” and “sexual orientation” are “two distinct categories of potential discrimination” and that the legislature’s decision not to add “sexual orientation” to the statute, when many other states had done so, clearly signified its intention, so the court “cannot expand the word ‘sex’ to include ‘sexual orientation.’”

The local prosecutor appealed this ruling. Perhaps not surprisingly, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey’s office filed a brief supporting the dismissal, while Lambda Legal, which has been actively litigating the issue whether “sex” includes “sexual orientation” in discrimination statutes, filed a brief supporting the local prosecutor.

A bare majority of the Supreme Court agreed with Judge Farrell that the hate crime counts must be dismissed. Chief Justice Loughry rejected any contention that the word “sex” as used in the statute was “ambiguous.”  As such, he wrote, it was not subject to “interpretation” but must be applied according to its “plain meaning.”

“Affording the undefined term ‘sex’ its common and ordinary meaning,” he wrote, “we find the word to be clear and unambiguous and to have a very different meaning and import than the term ‘sexual orientation.’” To support this proposition, he cited definitions from four dictionaries, noted that all but a five states have passed hate crimes laws but that no court has ever before interpreted those that do not specifically mention “sexual orientation” to apply to crimes committed because a victim was lesbian or gay.  He also repeated several times that the failure of the legislature to pass any of the 26 bills proposed to add “sexual orientation” to the statute evidenced legislative intent not to include it.  Furthermore, he wrote, in a criminal case the court should use the “rule of lenity” to ensure that people have clear notice of what conduct is condemned by the statute.  He also insisted that the court’s ruling did not imply approval of Butler’s conduct, and pointed out that Butler is still charged with two counts of battery.

“It is imperative to remember that it is not for this Court arbitrarily to read into a statute that which it does not say,” wrote Loughry. “Just as courts are not to eliminate through judicial interpretation words that were purposely included, we are obligated not to add to statutes something the legislature purposely omitted.”

Justice Margaret L. Davis, joined by Justice Robin Jean Workman, dissented in an opinion that brought together the recent opinions accepting the proposition that discriminating because of a person’s sexual orientation necessarily involves sex discrimination. As far as the dissenters are concerned, the term “sex” in the statute is not ambiguous but the prohibition of willfully injuring somebody because of their sex clearly includes the facts of this case.

Justice Davis built her argument by running through the developing case law, starting with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1989 Price Waterhouse decision and ending with 2nd Circuit Chief Justice Katzmann’s recent concurring opinion in Christiansen v. Omnicom Corporation.  This summary culminated with the following bold assertion:  “If a man stands on a corner kissing a man and is beaten because he is kissing a man, has he been assaulted because of his sex?  Yes, but not simply because he possesses male anatomical parts; rather, the crime occurred because he was perceived to be acting outside the social expectations of how a man should behave with a man.  But for his sex, he would not have been attacked.”

“The indictment in this case properly alleged the attack occurred because of the victims’ sex,” she continued. “Certain individuals are targeted for violence because they are perceived to violate socially-established protocols for gender and sex roles.  The perpetrators in such instances have drawn conclusions that the victim has contravened certain unspoken rules, and the bias-motivated crime thus ensues.”

Quoting from the 7th Circuit’s recent decision in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, she wrote, “While the majority might find the crime was actually committed ‘because of sexual orientation,’ it is a ‘common-sense reality that it is actually impossible to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation without discriminating on the basis of sex.’”

She accused the majority of concluding its analysis “prematurely. Simply finding the absence of those two magic words fatal to the State’s contention is the most effortless answer this Court could conjure. But while an answer without more in-depth analysis may be the path of least resistance, it also gives the shortest shrift to critical thinking. . .  The pertinent question is not whether the statute contains the words ‘sexual orientation.’  Rather, it is whether the crime was committed because of the victims’ sex.  The phrase ‘because of sex’ encompasses the actions taken against the victims in this case.”

Justice Davis rejected any argument that the developments in discrimination law could not be carried over to the criminal law context. She pointed out that developments in discrimination law and criminal law have been intertwined over the years.  “Anti-hate legislation has typically taken the form of either penalty enhancement or independent legislation,” she wrote.  “Both types generally define the unlawful acts as acts motivated ‘because of’ (‘based on,’ ‘on the basis of,’ ‘by reason of,’ etc.) . . . [certain protected statuses]. This form is similar to Title VII, the federal employment discrimination statute, a point Chief Justice Rehnquist invoked in upholding the Wisconsin [criminal] statute” in Wisconsin v. Mitchell in 1993.

She also pointed out that allowing the hate crime counts to proceed did not put the Supreme Court in the position of “both judge and jury,” as it would still be up to the prosecutor to prove the assertions of discriminatory intent required by the statute. “Allowing Counts I and III to stand would provide the prosecution ample time to prove the assertions, the jury would be properly instructed on evidentiary requirements and burdens of proof, and the State would be required to prove its allegations of statutory violation beyond a reasonable doubt.  At this juncture, however, the evaluation must concentrate upon the sufficiency of the indictment for a hate crime, and it is my firm belief that the majority of this Court adopted an overly narrow focus, metaphorically missing the forest for the trees.”

Because this decision did not address any federal constitutional issues, it cannot be appealed by the prosecutor to the U.S. Supreme Court. Theoretically, one might argue that the majority’s decision violates the equal protection rights of gay victims, as the court has interpreted the statute to protect straight people from being attacked because of their sex but to deny the same protection to gay people, for no reason other than the legislature’s repeated rejection of amendments to extend such protection to gay people.  But as far as one can tell from reading the majority and dissenting opinions, nobody made that argument in the West Virginia courts, so it was not preserved for review.

Mississippi Defies the 1st Amendment with “Freedom of Conscience” Law

Posted on: April 8th, 2016 by Art Leonard No Comments

On April 5 Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed into law H.B. 1523, a measure that received overwhelming approval in both houses of the state legislature.  Titled the “Protecting Freedom of Conscience From Government Discrimination Act,” the law was clearly intended to encourage businesses and individuals in the state to discriminate against same-sex couples, LGBT people, and even sexually-active unmarried heterosexuals.

Despite the broad wording of its title, the measure does not on its face protect freedom of conscience in general.  Instead, in Section 2, the legislature stated that “the sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that (a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman; (b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and (c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.”  The first of these, of course, defies the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges, that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.  The second defies the 2003 ruling, Lawrence v. Texas, which held that the state may not penalize sexual relations between consenting adults in private, regardless of their sex.  And the third defies the general medical consensus that gender identity is a human characteristic that exists apart from biological sex in terms of anatomy and genetics.

The law does not specify how it will be determined that somebody sincerely holds these beliefs or is merely asserting them opportunistically to avoid liability for mistreating somebody.

In effect, Mississippi has moved to protect from any adverse consequences at the hands of the state anybody who sincerely believes that a person born with a penis can only be considered a man for the rest of their life, and similarly a person born with a vagina can only be considered a woman.  This takes things one step further than North Carolina, which provided in its notorious H.B. 2, enacted in March, that “biological sex” means the sex indicated on a person’s birth certificate.  Since North Carolina will allow people to obtain new birth certificates consistent with their gender identity upon medical certification of surgical transition, that state evidently does not officially believe that sex is quite so “immutable.”

The new law goes on to protect people who act on these beliefs in various ways.  For example, religious organizations and clergy can refuse to have anything to do with same-sex marriages, including refusing to provide facilities or services in connection with same-sex marriage or to married same-sex couples.  Businesses can refuse to provide their goods or services or accommodations to same-sex couples, and can exclude transgender people from the use of single-sex-designated facilities consistent with their gender identity.  Nobody can be subjected to loss of their tax-exempt status or denial of government contracts or benefits because they have these “protected” beliefs.  People who spout anti-LGBT rhetoric will be protected from adverse consequences as well.  They can’t be fired from government jobs for articulating such beliefs, for example.

Government employees whose jobs involve authorizing or licensing marriages can seek “recusal from authorizing or licensing lawful marriages based upon or in a manner consistent with a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction” as defined in the statute, provided they send a written notice of such recusal to the State Registrar of Vital Records. They may not suffer any adverse consequences for recusing themselves, but “the person who is recusing himself or herself shall take all necessary steps to ensure that the authorization and licensing of any legally valid marriage is not impeded or delayed as a result of any recusal.”  Apparently, then, the person recusing themselves is responsible for being sure that somebody else who is willing to perform their duty is available to do so when the service is needed.  This provision is undoubtedly intended to shield the state from liability for refusing to provide a service that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to receive.

The law also relieves people who officiate at weddings from any obligation to perform ceremonies in violation of their sincerely held religious or moral beliefs about the invalidity of same-sex marriages. This presumably would include refusing to officiate if one of the prospective spouses is transgender and that raises religious or moral objections for the officiant because of their lack of belief in the reality of the individual’s gender identity.  OF course, such protection is completely superfluous, since nobody would seriously contend that the government can compel clergy to perform services.

The “discriminatory action” that the government is not allowed to take against people holding and acting on these beliefs goes far beyond taxes to encompass any state benefit, license, certification, accreditation, custody award or agreement, and on and on and on. The list seems to anticipate the variety of cases that have arisen around the country over the past few years in which people have suffered adverse consequences because of their religious objections to homosexuality or same-sex marriage.  For example, some people have been expelled from graduate counseling programs for refusing to provide non-judgmental counseling to gay clients, and such expulsions would clearly be prohibited by this law.  The law would also forbid denying government employment to anybody because of these sincerely held religious beliefs by the prospective employee.

The practical effect is to say that married same-sex couples can be denied a host of benefits and entitlements under a variety of programs, in blatant violation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell. Ironically, this law was enacted just days after a federal district judge in Mississippi ruled that the state’s ban on adoption of children by same-sex married couples violates the 14th Amendment in light of Obergefell.   And the law erects a structure somewhat akin to apartheid around same-sex marriages.

The measure seems clearly unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment, since it exalts and privileges particular religious beliefs and those who hold them for “special rights.”  On the other hand, some of the law is “merely” symbolic for several reasons.  First, since neither Mississippi nor any of its political subdivisions expressly outlaws discrimination in employment, housing or public accommodations because of sexual orientation or gender identity, people or businesses acting to deny goods, services or accommodations to LGBT people and same-sex couples could do so freely without any consequence under state law before this measure was enacted.  Second, due to the Supremacy Clause of the federal constitution, federal constitutional and statutory rights take priority over state law.

Thus, for example, under Title IX of the U.S. Education Amendments Act as interpreted by the U.S. Department of Education, educational institutions in Mississippi that receive federal money (which would be just about all of them) may not discriminate against transgender individuals because of their gender identity, and under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as interpreted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice, employers in Mississippi may not discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity.

And, of course, as a federal court ruled days earlier, state policies denying equal rights and benefits to married same-sex couples can be challenged under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

The main question now is who will file for the first lawsuit to challenge this travesty. Robbie Kaplan, the fearless slayer of DOMA, victorious advocate in the Mississippi marriage equality lawsuit, and representative of the plaintiffs in the same-sex parents adoption case, would be our candidate.

The Obama Government Contractor Executive Order

Posted on: July 19th, 2014 by Art Leonard No Comments

The White House has announced that President Barack Obama will sign an executive order on July 21, 2014, amending Executive Order 11246 to add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as prohibited grounds of discrimination by government contractors.  Announcements emanating from the White House suggest that the addition of these terms to the existing executive order are the only substantive changes that will be made.  The non-discrimination requirements will be included in new federal contracts made after the Labor Department has published final regulations implementing the amendments, probably beginning early in 2015.  Only new contracts entered after that date will be affected by the amendments.  [Update: The Order was signed this morning, July 21, and in addition to amending EO 11246, also amends EO 11478, which establishes non-discrimination policy within the Executive Branch, by addition “gender identity” to the categories already listed in the EO, which was originally adopted in 1969 by President Richard M. Nixon and was amended by Bill Clinton to add “sexual orientation” during the 1990s.]

EO 11246 was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 24, 1965, just a few months after Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went into effect at the beginning of July 1965.  EO 11246 charged the Labor Department, through its Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), to oversee a program under which “government contracting agencies” would include in every contract (with some exceptions) a provision under which the contractor agreed not to discriminate in employment because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, the categories of forbidden discrimination under Title VII, and agreed to abide by rules, regulations and relevant orders promulgated by the Labor Department to enforce this requirement.  Contractors are required generally to include similar provisions in any subcontracts they make as part of their performance of their federal contracts.  The penalty for “noncompliance” with these requirements could be cancellation, termination or suspension of the contract, and ineligibility for future contracts.  Complaints about noncompliance are handled administratively; the president does not have the power to enact laws that can be enforced by individual plaintiffs in the federal courts.  Generally EO 11246 charges the Labor Department to investigate complaints, to try to facilitate settlements, and to refer cases that involve violations of federal statutes to the appropriate enforcement agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).  Of course, the EEOC would only have jurisdiction to initiate enforcement action over complaints involving forms of discrimination prohibited by the statutes that agency is charged with enforcing, such as Title VII.

In 2002, President George W. Bush amended the executive order to provide that “this Order shall not apply to a Government contractor or subcontractor that is a religious corporation, association, educational institution, or society, with respect to the employment of individuals of a particular religion to perform work connected with the carrying on by such corporation, association, educational institution, or society of its activities.”  However, the Order states, “Such contractors or subcontractors are not exempted or excused from complying with the other requirements contained in this Order.”

According to advance word from the White House, President Obama’s amendments will not change this 2002 religious exemption and will not expand it in any way.  That is to say, religious corporations, associations, educational institutions or societies that contract with the federal government to provide services or goods will have to agree not to discriminate in their employment practices on the ground of sexual orientation or gender identity, which may present some of those organizations with particular challenges in light of the religious doctrines to which they adhere.  This raises immediate questions about whether religious organizations might plausibly argue that they cannot recognize a gay person as a member in good standing of their faith, regardless of that person’s professed beliefs?  Who gets to decide, for example, whether an individual professing to be Catholic but also being openly gay can be denied employment by a Catholic agency under contract to the federal government to provide social welfare services to the public, because the agency does not believe that an openly gay person can be deemed to be a practicing Catholic?

The First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause generally protects religious organizations from interference by the government in their religious activities.  The Supreme Court has held that organizations of any type do not have a constitutional right to refuse to comply with laws of general application that do not single out religious practices for prohibition.  At the same time, the Court has held that free exercise of religion includes giving religious organizations free reign in their employment policies regarding “ministers,” persons to be employed to carry out the religious mission of the organization.  There is some controversy about who can be deemed a ministerial employee, litigation tending to focus on teachers and administrators in religious schools who teach secular subjects but are deemed by the schools to be “ministers” nonetheless and required to sign employment contracts that commit them to avoiding conduct that violates the tenets of the religion.

After the Supreme Court issued its key ruling about the requirement to comply with laws of general application, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), providing that persons with religious objections to complying with laws of general application could claim a religious exemption unless the government could show that the government had a compelling interest supporting the general law and that the law provided the least restrictive alternative to achieving that interest.  In effect, Congress wanted to restore prior Supreme Court case law to the extent possible through a statute by imposing upon itself and the federal regulatory apparatus a limitation on its ability to compel people to comply with legal requirements that would violate their religious beliefs.  Many states passed similar laws placing the same restrictions on their own legislative and regulatory functions.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores that the federal Dictionary Act’s definition of “person” to include corporations applies to RFRA, in a case where two closely-held family-owned business corporations claimed an exemption from complying with regulations under the Affordable Care Act requiring them to cover certain contraceptive methods in health insurance for their employees.  The Court went on to hold that, assuming the government had a compelling reason for including these contraceptive methods in its coverage requirements, requiring these employers to arrange for and pay for the coverage was not the least restrictive method of achieving the coverage goal, as the government could provide the coverage directly itself, or could provide some other mechanism that would make the coverage available without imposing on the objecting corporation.  Another example of a less restrictive alternative cited by the Court was a regulation that the administration had adopted for religiously-identified non-profit corporations, who could signify their objections to the specific items of coverage on a form provided by the government that they would submit to their health insurer, which would then be required to provide the coverage and seek reimbursement from the government.  (That regulation is under attack by some religious non-profit corporations, that claim that executing the form and sending it t0 their insurer substantially burdens their free exercise rights as well.)

The Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling raised immediate fears about whether corporations owned or operated by individuals with religious objections to homosexuality and/or same sex marriage might claim exemptions from employing or serving gay people or same-sex couples.  In her dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited two cases on this point, in which state courts had rejected religious exemption claims from state public accommodations laws by a Minnesota health club, which did not want to have gay members, and a New Mexico wedding photographer, who had rejected a job preparing a wedding album for a lesbian couple.  The New Mexico case also involved that state’s version of RFRA, which the New Mexico Supreme Court held was not violated by application of the public accommodations law to a small business.  Similarly, there is litigation pending in Colorado involving a baker who rejected an order to provide a cake for the wedding celebration of a gay male couple.  These are not the kinds of businesses that would likely contract with the federal government, but the nature of the problem is clear.

Under the Executive Order, for example, could a closely-held family-owned company that produces certain technology that the federal government wants to buy, or that provides consulting services that the federal government wants to obtain, insist that for religious reasons it cannot employ gay people, or more particularly cannot continue to employee gay people who marry same-sex partners?  (There are many reports now of Catholic schools that have employed gay people as teachers and administrators for many years suddenly terminating their employment after learning that these people are marrying or have married a same-sex partner.)  Could a federal contractor refuse to include the same-sex spouse of an employee in its employee benefits plan on the same-basis that it includes different-sex spouses, because of religious objections to same-sex marriage?  EO 11246, as amended on July 21 by President Obama, would probably say no.  But if the protesting contractor sought protection from the non-discrimination requirement under RFRA, how would it fare?

These questions are difficult to answer prospectively.  In his opinion for the Court in Hobby Lobby, Justice Alito said that the court was ruling on the case before it, focusing on whether a closely-held family-owned business with religious objections to some forms of contraception was entitled to an exemption from ACA coverage requirements, at least to the extent that non-profit religiously-affiliated organizations had already been accorded by the Obama Administration in its regulations.  The Court, according to Alito, was not purporting to establish a wide-ranging exception to all legal obligations for all business corporations.  Alito commented that an employer could not rely on its religious beliefs to  seek exemption from the race discrimination requirements of Title VII.  But we don’t know whether that comment implicitly relied on the status of race as a suspect classification under the Equal Protection Clause, or the fact that Title VII recognizes a bona fide occupational qualification defense in cases involving religion, national origin or sex discrimination but not in cases involving race or color.  Did Alito mean to suggest more broadly that the RFRA exemption would not extend to any discrimination claims?  Justice Ginsburg was concerned about this in her dissent when she cited the two gay-specific examples from prior case law.  She might well have also noted the Supreme Court’s decision in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, where the majority found that the Boy Scouts’ 1st Amendment freedom of expression and association rights took priority over whatever interest the state of New Jersey had in forbidding public accommodations such as the Boy Scouts from discriminating based on sexual orientation.  What would the Supreme Court majority think about the relative weight of an executive order banning sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination as opposed to statutory protection for free exercise of religion in RFRA?  Statutes would logically outweigh executive orders when there is a conflict between the two.  Can a presidential executive order that is not effectuating a policy adopted by Congress (as the original 11246 was effectuating the policy of Title VII, albeit going beyond it by applying the non-discrimination requirement to businesses exempt from coverage under Title VII due to their size or the nature of their business) signify a compelling government interest, or does Congress have the sole authority to establish compelling government interests, since the President’s Executive Orders as a matter of law and custom are aimed at the internal policies of the Executive Branch?

When religious opponents of the LGBT executive order suggest that it is going to lead to litigation, they are not making empty threats.  It is likely that some contractor who loses or fails to obtain a contract because they will not comply on religious grounds with the non-discrimination requirement will go to court seeking injunctive relief, and the question will be squarely presented whether RFRA applies to the situation and whether a compelling state interest can be based on an executive order that is not effectuating a policy decision by Congress?

Other questions arise about the pending version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, approved last year by the Senate, which provides a rather broad religious exemption beyond the narrow exemption now found in Title VII, the ministerial exemption, or the Bush amendments to EO 11246.  In the wake of Hobby Lobby, one has to ask whether a narrower exemption, similar to that in Title VII, would survive challenge under RFRA?  Questions for which there are at present no firm answers…

Federal District Judge Exhibits Ignorance in Evaluating Sexual Orientation Discrimination Claim

Posted on: November 23rd, 2013 by Art Leonard No Comments

I glance at many court opinions almost every day in my ongoing quest of materials for my newsletter, Lesbian/Gay Law Notes, so I have a fairly good idea of what passes for constitutional analysis in federal district court opinions, but every now and then something just jumps out at me as reflecting sheer ignorance.  One example of this is Fletcher v. Little, a November 20 decision by U.S. District Judge Sue L. Robinson (D. Delaware), who was appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1991. (2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 164831)  The context is pro se prisoner litigation.  Timothy Fletcher is a gay inmate in a Delaware prison who claims to have suffered harassment from fellow prisoners and unequal treatment from prison personnel, including failing to change his housing situation and punishing him for fighting with his cellmate when he claims he was fighting to defend himself against being raped.  Judge Fletcher’s ruling granting the sole remaining defendant summary judgment on Fletcher’s Section 1983 equal protection claim may be correct, given her summary of the factual record.  But her discussion of the equal protection analysis strikes me as woeful.

Here it is:  “To state a claim under the Equal Protection Clause, plaintiff must allege that he is a member of a protected class and he was treated differently from similarly situated inmates.  See City of Cleburne, Tex. v. Cleburne Living Ctr., 473 U.S. 432, 439 (1985) (noting that the Equal Protection Clause ‘is essentially a direction that all persons similarly situated should be treated alike.’)  If the litigant does not claim membership in a protected class, he must allege arbitrary and intentional discrimination in order to state an equal protection claim.  See Village of Willowbrook v. Olech, 528 U.S. 562 (2000).  Plaintiff must state facts showing that: ‘(1) the defendant treated him differently from others similarly situated, (2) the defendant did so intentionally, and (3) there was no rational basis for the difference in treatment.’  Hill v. Borough of Kutztown, 455 F.3d 225, 239 (3rd Cir. 2006).  The Supreme Court has not recognized sexual orientation as a suspect class, and federal courts across the country have declined to identify homosexuals as a protected class.  See Price-Cornelison v. Brooks, 524 F.3d 1103, 1113 n.9 (10th Cir. 2008) (collecting cases).  Notably, plaintiff did not plead, and there is no evidence of record, that plaintiff was treated differently from similarly situated individuals and, even if he had, that there was no rational basis for any difference in treatment.  Finally, no matter how offensive and derogatory the language that defendant allegedly used with respect to plaintiff’s sexual orientation, that alone does not give rise to a constitutional claim.  See Aleem-X v. Westcott, 347 F. App’x 731 (3rd Cir. 2009) (unpublished) (verbal abuse of a prisoner, even of the lewd variety, is not actionable under 42 U.S.C. sec. 1983).  Plaintiff fails to plead a facially plausible equal protection claim.  Therefore, the court will dismiss the claim as frivolous pursuant to 28 U.S.C. sec. 1915(e)(2)(b)(ii) and Sec. 1915A(b)(1).”

In other words, Judge Robinson joins in the sloppy terminology and analysis in the equal protection context that speaks of “protected class,” a concept that is in fact alien to the equal protection theory, and says that “the Supreme Court has not recognized sexual orientation as a suspect class.”   This is weird.  How can a characteristic — sexual orientation — be a “class”?   What the equal protection theory requires is that the government have some rational justification if it is treating groups of people defined by a particular characteristic unequally with people who do not share that characteristic.  For example, “women” are not a “protected class,” and neither are “men.”  But the equal protection clause has been construed by the Supreme Court to require a substantial legitimate justification when the government systematically treats women differently from men, because the Court regards discrimination on the basis of sex — i.e., the characteristic of a person’s sex — as grounds for suspecting that the treatment is attributable to stereotype or bias.  We don’t have “suspect classes.”  We have “suspect classifications.”  The question is not whether “homosexuals” are a suspect class.  It is whether sexual orientation is a suspect classification.  That is, must the government have a legitimate justification for treating gay people differently from non-gay people in a particular situation?  When a gay prison inmate expresses fear of being subjected to sexual assault by a cellmate, and a prison official treats that fear differently than they would treat the fear of a non-gay prison inmate of being sexually assaulted by their cellmate, then there is discrimination because of sexual orientation, and the government needs to explain why it takes the one complaint seriously and the other not.

Judge Robinson cites a 2008 decision by the 10th Circuit as her authority for the proposition that “federal courts across the country have declined to identify homosexuals as a protected class.”  This reference is out-of-date and once again uses an improper term.  It can be read to suggest that as of 2008, federal courts around the country generally agree that the equal protection clause provides no protection for gay people against discriminatory adverse treatment by government officials.  This statement was certainly wrong as of 2008, and is most definitely wrong today.  In 1996, the Supreme Court ruled in Romer v. Evans that a state policy adversely affecting gay people violates the 14th amendment if there is not some legitimate, non-discriminatory justification for it.  This year, in U.S. v. Windsor, the court adopted the same approach in striking down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, finding that Congress’s decision to deny all federal recognition to same-sex marriages lawfully formed under state law was a deprivation of the “equal liberty” guaranteed by the 5th Amendment’s due process clause (which incorporates an equal protection requirement).  So, whether it is a state or the federal government that is acting, the constitution protects gay people from unjustifiable government discrimination.  For a more detailed analysis, one should consult the decisions by the 1st and 2nd Circuits in the DOMA cases that led up to the Supreme Court’s Windsor ruling.  The 1st Circuit took an approach of using a more searching form of equal protection review for sexual orientation discrimination claims, following the approach suggested by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her concurring opinion in Lawrence v. Texas (2003).  The 2nd Circuit, by contrast, in agreement with the Justice Department, found that “sexual orientation” discrimination calls for “heightened scrutiny,” the standard used to evaluate sex discrimination claims.  In both circuits, the courts recognized that there is a sound historical basis for suspecting that when the government treats gay people adversely, it is acting out of bias or moral disapproval of homosexuality rather than from some legitimate, non-discriminatory policy justification.  Judge Robinson’s application of the traditionally highly-deferential rational basis test is not consistent with these recent court of appeals decisions, much less the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Windsor.

It is clear that the 10th Circuit’s Price-Cornelison opinion from 2008 is not an accurate statement of the law any longer, if it ever was.  I would argue that it failed to reflect accurately what the Supreme Court had done in Romer v. Evans, and so was already more than a decade out of date when it was written.  Federal decisions subsequent to Romer in several circuits drive home the point, including the 9th Circuit’s rulings in the military context, and several decisions involving gay student harassment cases, including the 7th Circuit’s Nabozny decision issued shortly after Romer.

And federal district judges who have a “gay equal protection macro” in their office computers that inserts the standard paragraph based on outdated or incompetently stated case law should delete it.  I suspect this may be what is going on.  I doubt anybody doing competent research in current federal cases would produce the paragraph that appeared in Judge Robinson’s opinion, so I suspect it may be a recycling of outdated text, perhaps harvested from older circuit cases such as Price-Cornelison, thus perpetuating outdated statements about the law.  If Judge Robinson’s paragraphs quoted above were newly composed by a law clerk assigned to this case, I would suggest that the judge assign her clerk to read the recent equal protection rulings that I’ve mentioned to avoid producing an inaccurate work product in the future.