BREAKING: Department of Justice Argues Civil Rights Act Does Not Protect ‘Homosexuals’
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.
The DOJ embraces the theory Va did in Loving v. Virginia–employers who hate gay couples dislike lesbians and gay men equally. So it’s okay. pic.twitter.com/xF1KYpSrbv
— Anthony M. Kreis (@AnthonyMKreis) July 26, 2017
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.
Some responses via Twitter:
🚨🚨 ALERT: OUR OWN DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE THINKS THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT SHOULD NOT PROTECT #LGBTQ PEOPLE. 🚨🚨
— Lambda Legal (@LambdaLegal) July 26, 2017
Today this administration has really proved that they’re definitely not friends to LGBTQ people. https://t.co/BY4REg8PWC
— GLAAD (@glaad) July 26, 2017
This argument is jaw dropping but not surprising. https://t.co/ozWunjmdDY
— Anthony M. Kreis (@AnthonyMKreis) July 26, 2017
In this brief the United States also decides to to start referring to us as “homosexuals” again. MAGA https://t.co/LWHtbm6C6U
— Joshua Block (@JoshACLU) July 26, 2017
The DOJ thinks sexual orientation is unrelated to the sex of the persons you form intimate relationships with and any social constructs. pic.twitter.com/KQM4zWfqSS
— Anthony M. Kreis (@AnthonyMKreis) July 26, 2017
#zarda case – LGB rights at stake in the case – DOJ wants to give LGB folks fewer rights, their own EEOC commission’s opinion be damned. https://t.co/spUQXkjXiY
— Nicole tate-naghi (@Nicolen922) July 26, 2017
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News
Trump Complains the ‘Fake News Went Crazy’ With Coverage of His 2-Hour Meeting With Notorious Racist He Won’t Condemn
On Saturday evening, Donald Trump issued a fourth statement on his meeting with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and once again refused to denounce his racism and anti-Semitism.
Trump posted to his Truth Social account, “so I help a seriously troubled man, who just happens to be black, Ye (Kanye West), who has been decimated in his business and virtually everything else, and who has always been good to me, by allowing his request for a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, alone, so that I can give him very much needed ‘advice.’”
“He shows up with 3 people, two of which I didn’t know, the other a political person who I haven’t seen in years. I told him don’t run for office, a total waste of time, can’t win. Fake News went crazy,” Trump wrote.
Trump’s dinner has already become an issue in the 2024 presidential campaign and could play a role in determining the next Speaker of the House of Representatives. Trump’s ambassador to Israel condemned him dining with “human scum.”
Trump has received harsh headlines.
“Trump criticized for dining with far-right activist Nick Fuentes and rapper Ye,” headlined The Washington Post.
“Trump’s Latest Dinner Guest: Nick Fuentes, White Supremacist,” was The New York Times headline.
“Trump world reels after white nationalist dinner,” headlined Politico playbook.
“Trump’s former US ambassador to Israel blasts meeting with Ye, Nick Fuentes: ‘You are better than this,'” Fox News headlined.
NBC News headlined, “‘F—ing nightmare’: Trump team does damage control after he dines with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes”
In an interview with The Guardian, one of Donald Trump’s former senior advisers stated that the word he is getting from people he has spoken to is that they want the former president to be put out to pasture after the poor midterm election results for Republicans weeks ago.
According to John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser, it’s time for the GOP to move on from the former president if the party wants to reclaim the Oval Office in 2024.
Bolton, whose tenure serving under Trump ended acrimoniously, told the Guardian’s David Smith that there are a multitude of reasons to put Trump in the rearview mirror, but the impact that the former president had on GOP fortunes in the midterms seems to be the final straw with many conservatives.
“There are a lot of reasons to be against Trump being the nominee but the one I’m hearing now as I call around the country, talking to my supporters and others about what happened on 8 November, is the number of people who have just switched Trump off in their brain,” Bolton explained.
ALSO IN THE NEWS: Trump’s new Mar-a-Lago scandal proves why aides want him to stick to a teleprompter
Elaborating, he continued, “Even if they loved his style, loved his approach, loved his policies, loved everything about him, they don’t want to lose and the fear is, given the results on 8 November, that if he got the nomination, not only would he lose the general election, but he would take an awful lot of Republican candidates down with him.”
“There’s no doubt Trump’s endorsement in the primary can be very valuable to a candidate in the Republican party. But relying on that endorsement or trumpeting yourself as the Trump-endorsed candidate is poisonous in the general election. So if you actually want to win elections, Trump is not the answer,” Bolton continued. “William F Buckley [the conservative author] once had a rule that in Republican primaries he supported the most conservative candidate capable of winning the general election and, under that theory, Trump loses.”
The Guardian’s Smith notes that Bolton “… joins Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence, secretary of state Mike Pompeo, attorney general William Barr, UN ambassador Nikki Haley, chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and onetime ally Chris Christie in a growing rebellion among alumni making the case – overtly or subtly – that Trump has become an electoral liability.”
You can read more here.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license
News
Trump’s Dinner With Kanye Also Included a Former Aide Accused in Pay-for-Pardon Play, and White Supremacist Fuentes
Donald Trump‘s dinner earlier this week with antisemite Kanye West and holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes may also have included two other right-wingers, hinted at by the former president himself.
After Axios‘ reporting confirmed that Fuentes had in fact had dinner with Trump, Trump issued a statement saying, “Our dinner meeting was intended to be Kanye and me only, but he arrived with a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about.”
But later, on Friday afternoon via his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote a defense of the dinner with an expanded guest list.
“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote. “Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about. We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.”
As The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman noted, Trump did not denounce his guest’s extremist beliefs.
“Three of his friends,” according to the far-right wing website Breitbart, apparently includes Fuentes, far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and former Trump 2016 aide Karen Giorno.
Breitbart states, “two people who say they were at the dinner on Tuesday evening–Yiannopoulos and onetime Trump aide Karen Giorno–have publicly stated that Fuentes was in fact at the dinner with West and Trump.”
“’Nick attended the dinner and sat across from the president. I sat to the president’s right and Ye to his left,’ Giorno said in a statement to podcaster Tim Poole’s website Timcast,” Breitbart reports. “‘The president was by himself for dinner but invited Ye to meet some people on the patio.'”
Politico reports Giorno “confirmed to Politico that she was also at the dinner with Trump, West and Fuentes,” but does not mention Yiannopoulos as a dinner guest.
Referring to Kanye West by his new name, VICE News adds: “Ye, who has been been on an antisemitic spiral in recent months, announced he is going to be running for president in 2024, and Yiannopoulos is his campaign manager. He claimed that he asked the former president to run with him as his vice-president. According to Ye, the dinner involving the billionaire, the rapper, and the white nationalist devolved into screaming and derogatory epithets.”
Yiannopoulos is the former Breitbart editor who became disgraced after saying, “I think in the gay world some of the most important, enriching and incredibly life-affirming, important shaping relationships very often between younger boys and older men.” Earlier this year U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene came under fire for hiring, as an intern, Yiannopoulos, even after he appeared to support sexual “relationships” between boys as young as 13 and older men.
Karen Giorno, The New York Times reported early last year, “had access to people around the president, having run Mr. Trump’s campaign in Florida during the 2016 primary and remaining on board as a senior political adviser during the general election.”
“In July 2018, Ms. Giorno signed an agreement with Mr. Kiriakou, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, ‘to seek a full pardon from President Donald Trump of his conviction’ for $50,000 and promised another $50,000 as a bonus if she secured a pardon,” The Times reports.
Kiriakou is John Kiriakou, who The Times identifies as “a former C.I.A. officer convicted of illegally disclosing classified information.”
On what appears to be her Instagram page, Giorno has photos of herself with numerous Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Flynn, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida attorney general Ashley Moody and several other top Florida elected officials, U.S. Rep. Brian Mast, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, and Sarah Palin, among others.
Trump Complains the ‘Fake News Went Crazy’ With Coverage of His 2-Hour Meeting With Notorious Racist He Won’t Condemn
‘Poisonous’: Former Advisor Says Republicans Have ‘Just Switched Trump Off in Their Brain’
Trump’s Dinner With Kanye Also Included a Former Aide Accused in Pay-for-Pardon Play, and White Supremacist Fuentes
Trump Claims He ‘Knew Nothing About’ the White Supremacist Antisemite Who He and Kanye West Dined With at Mar-a-Lago
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COMMENTARY2 days agoWatch: Chasten Buttigieg Says Tucker Carlson Is Focusing on ‘Hate’ After Host’s Latest Anti-Gay Attack on His Husband
News2 days agoTrump’s Dinner With Kanye Also Included a Former Aide Accused in Pay-for-Pardon Play, and White Supremacist Fuentes
News2 days agoTrump Claims He ‘Knew Nothing About’ the White Supremacist Antisemite Who He and Kanye West Dined With at Mar-a-Lago
News1 day ago‘Poisonous’: Former Advisor Says Republicans Have ‘Just Switched Trump Off in Their Brain’
News10 hours agoTrump Complains the ‘Fake News Went Crazy’ With Coverage of His 2-Hour Meeting With Notorious Racist He Won’t Condemn
