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BREAKING: Department of Justice Argues Civil Rights Act Does Not Protect ‘Homosexuals’

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Jeff Sessions’ DOJ Argues Sexual Orientation Discrimination Is Not Sex Discrimination

The Department of Justice has just filed a brief arguing the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect gay workers. Barely 12 hours after President Donald Trump launched a historic assault banning active duty transgender service members, his administration has told a federal appeals court the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect “homosexuals” from discrimination.

(The DOJ’s use of the term “homosexuals” is itself a throw back to a time when anti-LGBT discrimination was acceptable.)

In short, the amicus brief claims sexual orientation discrimination is not sex discrimination, contrary to the published position of at least one federal agency, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “makes it unlawful to discriminate against someone on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity) or religion.”

In 2015 a federal judge ruled that “claims of sexual orientation discrimination are gender stereotype or sex discrimination claims,” in a Title IX case.

Wednesday evening the Dept. of Justice filed an amicus brief in Zarda v. Altitude Express. Lambda Legal summarized the case:

In September 2010, [Donald] Zarda, a skydiver, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York against his former employer, Altitude Express, Inc, alleging that the company violated the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against him because of his sexual orientation. The district court rejected his claim, saying that the Civil Rights Act does not protect him for bias he endured for being a gay man. Tragically, in October 2014, Zarda died in a base jumping accident in Switzerland.

In January 2017, Gregory Antollino argued an appeal on behalf of Zarda’s estate asking a three judge panel of the Second Circuit to revisit its precedent and hold that sexual orientation discrimination is a form of sex discrimination and therefore illegal under the Civil Rights Act. The three-judge panel denied Zarda’s claim in April 2017, but held that Zarda would be entitled to a new trial if the full Second Circuit agreed with his arguments about Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

The ACLU, in its amicus brief in the case, writes that the “Supreme Court has explained that sex discrimination occurs whenever an employer takes an employee’s sex into account when making an adverse employment decision. Courts have applied this principle to countless forms of employer bias, from cases involving a ban on hiring mothers of preschool-aged children to bias against Asian-American women to the failure to promote a Big Eight accounting firm partnership candidate because she was considered to be ‘macho.’ Time and again, courts have refused to allow generalizations about men and women – or about certain types of men and women – to play any role in employment decisions.”

But that’s not what the Trump Dept. of Justice is arguing. The DOJ is arguing that it’s OK to discriminate against LGBT people in the workplace.

In short, the DOJ’s argument consists of these bullet points:

  • TITLE VII’S BAR AGAINST DISCRIMINATION BECAUSE OF SEX IS NOT VIOLATED UNLESS MEN AND WOMEN ARE TREATED UNEQUALLY
  • DISCRIMINATION BECAUSE OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION IS NOT DISCRIMINATION BECAUSE OF SEX UNDER TITLE VII

“Among Zarda’s boosters is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a largely autonomous federal agency that handles civil rights disputes in the workplace, which supported Zarda last month in its own court filing,” Buzzfeed’s Dominic Holden reports.

He notes, “the Justice Department argues, ‘the EEOC is not speaking for the United States and its position about the scope of Title VII is entitled to no deference beyond its power to persuade.'”

In other words, the DOJ is saying the EEOC, whose job it is to determine application of the equal rights law, does not determine application of the equal rights law.

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National Conversation Needed on Law-Abiding Tax-Paying Undocumented Immigrants: Gingrich

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As President Donald Trump’s immigration polling numbers deteriorate and criticism of federal agents grows — and following the killings of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minnesota — Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is calling for a national conversation about undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, have lived in the United States for years, and are good neighbors.

Gingrich called on President Donald Trump to “open up a national dialogue,” as he told Fox Business, saying that “this is about dignity,” a quote he took from U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL).

“Americans don’t want to see the police behaving like a mob, Americans don’t want to see people killed in the streets, and Americans don’t want to see the kind of hunting down people in a way that really demeans the process,” he insisted.

“We need a national conversation about what we’re going to do, about people who’ve come here, some of them 20 years ago, who’ve been obeying the law, paying taxes, good neighbors, have kids, go to PTA,” Gingrich said. “Very few Americans want to see the police walk in and pick them up and deport them.”

READ MORE: Right-Wing Groups Launch Coordinated Push to Overturn Same-Sex Marriage

“On the other hand, people do not want to give them citizenship,” he claimed. “So there should be some middle ground here on long-term goals.”

Federal agents, he said, “may well need more training and maybe more restraint.”

But Gingrich also claimed that anyone trying to stop them from carrying out the law is “engaged in insurrection.”

According to The Hill, “a growing number of Republicans and conservative commentators are urging the White House to shift course and scale back its aggressive immigration enforcement, especially for law-abiding immigrants with roots in their communities.”

MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough, The Hill added, suggested that “if you’ve been in America for a long time, if you’ve been law-abiding, if you’re an asylum-seeker, certainly if you’ve had children that have served in the military, you’re at the front of the line” to return to the U.S. if you’ve been deported.

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

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Right-Wing Groups Launch Coordinated Push to Overturn Same-Sex Marriage

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Forty-seven right-wing organizations have joined together to try to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling that found same-sex couples have the same rights and responsibilities to marriage as different-sex couples. The coalition’s focus is to change national public opinion on same-sex marriage by declaring that children are “Greater Than” equality.

“We’re all going to speak with one voice, and it is ‘don’t touch the kids,’” the group’s founder, right-wing activist Katy Faust, told American Family Radio, as People for the American Way reported.

“Faust made it clear that the campaign will continue a long and dishonorable legacy of anti-LGBTQ forces smearing gay people and couples as threats to children,” PFAW added. “She called parenting by same-sex couples a ‘destructive state-sanctioned gaslighting experiment on children.'”

According to The Daily Signal, which was launched by The Heritage Foundation, Faust also said that since the Obergefell ruling, children have been “deprived of the unique love and guidance only a mother and father can provide.”

Contributors to the project are promoting old claims that studies have disproven.

READ MORE: ‘Crime Might Be in Progress’: Ex-DHS Official Warns After Trump FBI Raids Election Office

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler said in the group’s launch video that same-sex marriage “harms children in virtually every way imaginable.”

Colson Center CEO John Stonestreet claimed that social science data reveals that kids “do best when they are raised in a home with married, biological mom and dad.”

Numerous studies have shown that children raised by same-sex parents fare at least as well as children raised by different-sex parents.

A large 2014 study found that children raised by same-sex couples were happier and healthier than their peers raised by different-sex couples.

In 2023, The Guardian reported on a study that also found that “children of same-sex couples fare just as well, if not better, than those of heterosexual couples.”

“The findings chime with several other studies, including three decades of research from Australia that revealed children raised by same-sex parents do as well emotionally, socially and educationally as their peers in heterosexual families.”

Hemant Mehta at The Friendly Atheist wrote that the “Greater Than” campaign “claims loving gay parents are the real threat to kids.”

“While the video has received the bulk of the attention so far, it’s the campaign’s website that actually deserves a closer look. Because surely there’s evidence that children with gay parents suffer, right?” Mehta said. “Nope. There are no studies cited on the website. There’s no proof of any sort offered anywhere.”

He charged: “This is nothing more than repackaged bigotry and finding new ways to express anti-gay hate because the old ways no longer work.”

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

 

Image via Shutterstock

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‘Crime Might Be in Progress’: Ex-DHS Official Warns After Trump FBI Raids Election Office

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Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during President Donald Trump’s first term, is sounding the alarm after the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia election office and removed ballots and related voting materials from the 2020 election, in what is being called an “apparently unprecedented action.”

Taylor is also warning that Trump Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was “caught on camera” at the raid — a highly unusual move for the nation’s intel chief, a role that is supposed to be nonpartisan.

“This is bad. Very bad. But we don’t need to speculate wildly about why this is happening,” Taylor writes. “In an interview earlier this month, Trump openly said he wished he’d ‘seized’ ballots in the 2020 election, and he suggested he had the authority to do so. That should have rung alarm bells across the country.”

“When he laments he didn’t ‘seize’ ballot boxes after losing the 2020 election, he’s referring to a specific executive order that he thinks would justify such an act.”

“But guess what?” Taylor also wrote. “I co-wrote the order he’s talking about. He’s lying. And a crime might be in progress.”

READ MORE: Trump ‘Hellbent’ on Punishing Americans He Still Claims ‘Stole’ the Election: Columnist

“Trump and his lawyers, Taylor says, “have suggested that Executive Order 13848, signed in 2018, gives the president the power to intervene in elections, even to the point of seizing voting machines or ballots.”

But he insists that it does not — and warns that those involved in drafting that executive order are willing to testify that it does not.

He says the executive order was designed to make it easier to impose consequences on foreign actors who interfered in U.S. elections — but “NOT to revisit vote counts. NOT to rummage through ballot boxes. And certainly NOT to allow a president to deploy the military against local election infrastructure because he didn’t like the outcome.”

Taylor also charges that Trump is now “reinterpreting the order as some all-powerful election snooping tool.”

Trump stating that he should have seized ballots, according to Taylor, is “an admission he wanted to take an illegal act and then pretend the law would have somehow allowed it.”

He also takes aim at DNI Gabbard.

“I can’t emphasize how big of a break in custom this is (at best) and how deeply corrupt it might be (at worst),” that she was at the FBI raid on Wednesday — saying that it “stinks to high hell.”

Commenters weighed in.

The Lincoln Project’s Jeff Timmer, a political strategist, wrote: “This is a big f — — deal, and all y’all need to act like it. ”

“When Trump’s storm troopers show up at the Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Fulton County, Maricopa County, etc clerks’ offices and seize absentee ballots before they can be opened and counted, it will be too late,” he warned.

“People,” warned veteran journalist Michael Burgi, “this FBI raid on an Atlanta voting center is really dangerous. Especially when Tulsi Gabbard is lingering in the background.”

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

Image via Reuters

 

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