Today, almost four years to do the day that the Supreme Court legalized marriage equality, the court in a 6-3 vote ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits anti-LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace. It’s, for lack of a better word, stunning, especially considering that the Trump-appointed Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion for the court.
The Trump administration’s gutting of health care protections for transgender people on Friday, in my opinion, is no coincidence. The administration was trying to send a clear signal to Gorsuch & the conservative justices on SCOTUS about this ruling.
Gorsuch’s opinion doesn’t just have ramifications in the fight for greater equality; it’s also a slap in the face to the religious right’s backing of the president. Trump won a whopping 81 percent of the “white, born-again/evangelical Christian” vote in 2016 in part because he promised to stack the courts with social conservatives. Now, I hope that many of these voters will question whether their deal with the devil was worth it.
