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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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‘Antisemitic’: Trump Blasted for Attack on Jewish Democrats

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Donald Trump is attacking Jews who vote Democratic, barely days after the criminally-indicted ex-president threatened there would be a “bloodbath” if voters do not put him back in the Oval Office. His remarks, which include claiming Jews Democrats “hate” Israel and their own religion, were quickly labeled antisemitic.

“I actually think they hate Israel,” Trump on Monday told far right wing radio host Sebastian Gorka, who alleged the Biden administration and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “hate” Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

“I think they hate Israel. And the Democrat Party hates Israel,” Trump, upping the ante, responded. Gorka is his former White House aide who served briefly in the Trump administration before reportedly being “ousted.”

“I really believe they hate Israel,” Trump also said, and accused Majority Leader Schumer, a Democrat who has represented New York for the past quarter-century, of appearing to hate Israel, for “votes.”

READ MORE: ‘Easy Mark’: Why Trump’s $464M Bond Failure Makes Him a ‘Massive National Security Risk’

“I think it’s votes more than anything else, because he was always pro-Israel. He’s very anti-Israel now,” Trump continued, before declaring: “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”

Haaretz reports, “Trump’s comments follow similar comments made during a Fox News interview, where he accused Israel of ‘being loyal to a fault’ for hoping to maintain bipartisan support within the United States.”

Trump, under tremendous fire for his “bloodbath” remarks, was immediately denounced for his comments.

“Another day, another depraved antisemitic screed from Donald Trump, who has repeatedly vilified the overwhelmingly majority of American Jews,” observed Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “He first called us ‘uninformed or disloyal’ in 2019 and essentially repeated it today. The feeling is mutual. 79% of Jewish voters have an unfavorable view of Trump according to @pewresearch.”

The Times of Israel’s Sam Sokol writes, “Trump said that ‘any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.’ That’s a majority of US Jews. Gentiles don’t get to decide who is a good Jew. That kind of rhetoric is in itself antisemitic.”

The Biden campaign was quick to post a clip of trump’s remarks. Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

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COMMENTARY

‘Easy Mark’: Why Trump’s $464M Bond Failure Makes Him a ‘Massive National Security Risk’

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National security, legal, and political experts are lining up to sound the alarm about the potential national security risks swirling around Donald Trump, and those warnings are getting stronger.

One month after Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to announce his run for president, CNN reported on the real estate mogul’s repeated claims of great wealth. At one point Trump told supporters he was worth “well over $10 billion.” At other points Trump says, “I’m very rich,” and “I’m really rich.” CNN’s John King noted, “some voters see this as a virtue, in the sense that they think politicians are too beholden to special interests.”

Days later Politico ran with this headline: “Donald Trump’s new pitch: I’m so rich I can’t be bought.”

Fast forward nearly a decade later.

Donald Trump’s attorneys declared in court documents Monday that 30 companies all refused to secure a $464 million bond for Trump, which he owes the State of New York after losing his civil business fraud trial.

The sirens are now wailing.

READ MORE: ‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

Citing a Washington Post report, MSNBC’s Steve Benen writes, “it’s now ‘expected’ that Manafort will be hired” to work on the Trump 2024 presidential campaign, “at least in part because the former president is ‘determined to bring Manafort back into the fold.'”

Manafort is Paul Manafort, Trump’s former 2016 campaign chairman who in 2017, “surrendered to the F.B.I. and pleaded not guilty to charges that he laundered millions of dollars through overseas shell companies,” according to a New York Times report in October of 2017.

The Times also noted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had “announced charges … against three advisers to President Trump’s campaign,” including Manafort, “and laid out the most explicit evidence to date that his campaign was eager to coordinate with the Russian government to damage his rival, Hillary Clinton.”

In 2019, NPR reported, almost as a footnote, that “a court filing that was inadvertently unsealed earlier this year, revealed that Manafort shared polling data with a business associate who has ties to Russian intelligence services.”

In his MSNBC report, Benen noted, “the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Manafort ‘represented a grave counterintelligence threat‘ in 2016 due to his relationship with a Russian intelligence officer.”

“’The Committee found that Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign,’ the Senate report added.” Benen also reported: “When the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report literally pointed to a ‘direct tie between senior Trump Campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services,’ it was referring in part to Manafort ‘directly and indirectly’ communicating with an accused Russian intelligence officer, a Russian oligarch, and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.”

Benen reinforced his thesis, writing on social media: “When the Senate Intelligence Committee pointed to a ‘direct tie’ between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence services, it was referring in large part to Paul Manafort — who’s reportedly now headed back to Team Trump.”

Add to all that this plea from The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a retired U.S. Naval War College professor and expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs.

READ MORE: ‘Next Up – Property Seizures’: Experts Analyze ‘Unbankable’ Trump’s $464 Million Bond Crisis

“According to reports last week, the U.S. intelligence community is preparing to give Donald Trump classified intelligence briefings, a courtesy every White House extends to major-party candidates to ensure an effective transition. An excellent tradition—but not one that should be observed this year,” Nichols wrote at The Atlantic in a piece titled, “Donald Trump Is a National-Security Risk.”

“Indeed, if Trump were a federal employee, he’d have likely already been stripped of his clearances and escorted from the building.”

After discussing “Trump’s open and continuing affection” for authoritarian dictators, Nichols notes, “even if Trump could explain away his creepy dictator crushes and clarify his byzantine finances, he is currently facing more than half a billion dollars in court judgments against him.”

“That’s a lot of money for anyone, and Trump’s scramble to post a bond for even a small portion of that suggests that the man is in terrible financial condition, which is always a bright-red light in the clearance process.”

Political strategist Simon Rosenberg on Monday warned: “If Trump is given access to national security briefings he will now have someone with a proven history of selling stuff to the Russians on his team to help facilitate the movement of our intel to our adversaries.”

Also on Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote on X: “We cannot emphasize this enough: Trump’s mounting court fines make him a massive national security risk.”

“After multiple losses against E. Jean Carroll and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Donald Trump is facing judgements that could end up costing him upwards of $600 million,” CREW reported February 29. “But these rulings are more than a financial headache for Trump, they are an unprecedented opportunity to buy influence with a leading presidential candidate and a sitting president should he be re-elected.”

Diving deeper, CREW notes, “Trump left the presidency with at least $1.1 billion dollars in debt tied to the COVID-weakened commercial real estate market, the vast majority of which would come due in a hypothetical second term in office. These rulings would make that number 50% higher.”

“Giving the highest and most powerful office in the land to someone deeply in debt and looking for ways to make back hundreds of millions of dollars he lost in court is a recipe for the kinds of corruption that aren’t theoretical when it comes to Trump. There’s a reason that you can’t get a job in the military or the financial services industry, or even referee a major sporting event, if you have a massive amount of debt. And you certainly aren’t getting a security clearance because you become too big of a target for corruption.”

Bloomberg Opinion senior executive editor Tim O’Brien, an MSNBC political analyst and author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” observed, “Trump’s financial trap — he can’t come up with the cash to appeal his $454 million civil fraud judgment — may ravage his business. More directly: It intensifies his threat to national security by making him an easy mark for overseas interests.”

“There’s no reason to believe that Trump, whose businesses collected millions of dollars from foreign governments and officials while he was president, won’t have a for-sale sign out now that he’s struggling with the suffocating weight of court judgments,” O’Brien continues at Bloomberg. “Trump is being criminally prosecuted for allegedly misappropriating classified documents and stashing them at Mar-a-Lago, his home in Palm Beach, Florida. Without a trial and public disclosure of more evidence, Trump’s motivations for taking the documents are unknown, but it’s reasonable to wonder whether he pondered trying to sell them. Monetizing the White House has been something of a family affair, after all. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been busy trading financially on his proximity to the former president, for example.”

O’Brien concludes, “the going is likely to get rough for Trump as this plays out, and he’s likely to become more financially desperate with each passing day. That’s going to make him easy prey for interested lenders — and an easy mark for overseas interests eager to influence US policy.”

READ MORE: FBI Agent Furious Over MAL Search Thought Trump Would Return Classified Docs if Just Asked

 

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‘How Fascism Came to Germany’: Historian Warns Trump ‘Knew Exactly What He Was Saying’

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Award-winning presidential historian Michael Beschloss sounded the alarm after Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” threat over the weekend, warning that his remarks echo those that led to the rise and installation of fascism in pre-World War II Germany and Italy.

“That’s how fascism and totalitarianism and in Germany’s case the Holocaust came to Germany, which had been a country where there were big institutions of democracy until, as you well know, the early 1930s,” Beschloss said on MSNBC Monday to “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski (video below). “In a way of Donald Trump has done us all a favor, because if you and I had been talking, Mika, let’s say 20 years ago, and they’ve been talking about what would have seemed like a very abstract and distant subject of how fascism and dictatorship might come to America, you probably would have been more wiser.”

“I would have said, you would have had some smiling person pretending to be a normal candidate like all the candidates for president who had gone before all the way back to 1789. And suddenly, after getting elected, that person would use the enormous powers of the presidency, that are given to that person, by their constitution,” Beschloss continued.

READ MORE: ‘Next Up – Property Seizures’: Experts Analyze ‘Unbankable’ Trump’s $464 Million Bond Crisis

“In a way Donald Trump has made it easier because when he tells you he’ll be a dictator for a day, we all know that dictators don’t resign after a day. When he uses the word bloodbath. Yes, it was in the context of an automobile industry speech, but he knew exactly what he was saying, When he talks about suspending the Constitution, or migrants as animals, this is him. He’s telling you what this choice is,” He continued, adding there is no “precedent for this.”

“I hate it when people treat this race as if it’s just one more presidential campaign. And there was lots of jokes, you know, both sides, you know, flaws and both candidates. Yes, these are two old candidates. One of those that is mentally stable, Joe Biden, whom I saw give a great speech at the Gridiron Dinner on Saturday night. Donald Trump, if you look at one of his speeches of these rallies, this is not someone who seems to have all his marbles.”

Beschloss says, “it’s important to know as we talk about this campaign, as it unfolds, we have never seen anything remotely like this in American history: a major party candidate is saying, you elect me, there’s going to be dictatorship, bloodbath, violence, retribution against my political enemies, that equals what we saw in Italy, in Germany and other places. If Americans do not get that if they choose that voluntarily, then this country has changed in a way that I do not understand.”

Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Bloodbath’: Psaki Slams Trump Over ‘Embrace of Political Violence’

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