The bigots were claiming that this was never the original intend of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is true, but it is also true that the sections on sex discrimination were inserted by an ardent segregationist, Howard W. Smith, to kill the bill, so the claim of original intent is rather specious.

I’m just enjoying the butt-hurt of the bigots and the haters right now:

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination “because of sex.”

Today the Supreme Court, by a vote of 6-3, ruled that even if Congress may not have had discrimination based on sexual orientation or transgender status in mind when it enacted the landmark law over a half century ago, Title VII’s ban on discrimination protects gay, lesbian and transgender employees. Because fewer than half of the 50 states currently ban employment discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation, today’s decision is a major victory for LGBT employees.

………

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed the third lawsuit, involving the rights of transgender employees, in federal district court in Michigan against R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes after the funeral home fired Aimee Stephens, a funeral director and embalmer who announced that she would begin living as a woman. (Stephens died on May 12 from complications from kidney failure, but her wife, Donna, took her place in the lawsuit.) The district court agreed with the funeral home that Title VII does not protect transgender employees from discrimination, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit reversed. The justices agreed to hear the cases last spring. Although the two cases involving discrimination based on sexual orientation were argued separately from the case involving discrimination based on gender identity, the court issued one ruling this morning that covered all three cases. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Gorsuch framed the question before the court as a straightforward one: “Today,” he wrote, “we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender.” The answer to that question, he continued, “is clear.” When an employer fires an employee “for being homosexual or transgender,” that employer “fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

It is particularly delicious that this has been authored that the right’s golden boy Gorsuch.