Gender identity protections good for the economy, companies tell SCOTUS

Washington D.C., Jul 2, 2019 / 01:00 pm (CNA).- More than 200 businesses have asked the Supreme Court to recognize anti-discrimination protections on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation as good for business and the economy.

The companies filed a joint amicus brief with the Supreme Court this week, after the court announced it would hear oral argumentation in the next judicial year, in October.

“The U.S. economy is strengthened when all employees are protected from discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation or gender identity,” 206 businesses argued in their “friend of the court” brief in a bundle of three employment discrimination cases that will be heard before the Supreme Court this October in oral arguments.

The question before the Court will be whether protections against sex discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also include discrimination on basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, or discrimination against transgender people.

“The failure to recognize that Title VII protects LGBT workers would hinder the ability of businesses to compete in all corners of the nation, and would harm the U.S. economy as a whole,” the first section of the brief stated.

The filing comes at the end of  “Pride Month,” during which many cities and corporations mark the campaign of LGBT advocacy. On June 10, the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education released a document which included a sweeping denunciation of so-called gender theory and the “radical separation between gender and sex, with the former having priority over the later.”

“In all such [gender] theories, from the most moderate to the most radical, there is agreement that one’s gender ends up being viewed as more important than being of male or female sex,” the Congregation for Catholic Education wrote in the document entitled “Male and Female He Created Them.”

“The effect of this move is chiefly to create a cultural and ideological revolution driven by relativism, and secondarily a juridical revolution, since such beliefs claim specific rights for the individual and across society.”

The 206 businesses who filed the amicus brief “collectively employ over 7 million employees, and comprise over $5 trillion in revenue,”according to their court submission, and they argue “that no one should be passed over for a job, paid less, fired, or subjected to harassment or any other form of discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

The amici curiae include employers from various sectors, such as communications, financial, technological, food and hospitality industries; the list of employers includes big businesses such as Airbnb, Amazon, American Airlines, American Express, Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Ben & Jerry’s, Bloomberg L.P., Coca-Cola, Comcast NBC Universal, CVS Health, Domino’s, eBay, Facebook, General Motors, Google, LinkedIn, IBM, JP Morgan Chase & Co., Lyft, Macy’s, Marriott International, Mastercard International Inc., NIKE, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, Uber, and Univision Services Inc.

The San Francisco Giants and the Tampa Bay Rays of Major League Baseball also signed on to the brief.

“The brief has more corporate signers than any previous business brief in an LGBTQ non-discrimination case,” the Human Rights Campaign said in a blog post.

The brief argues that specific employment protections for people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, are “not unreasonably costly or burdensome for business” and that uniform federal protections are needed so that businesses can “benefit” from “consistency.”

To lack such protections across-the-board, they argued, would pose “significant costs for employers and employees.”

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act expressly forbids employment discrimination on basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and sex; three cases that are to be argued before the Supreme Court in October are all related to whether this prohibition of sex discrimination includes protections against employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

The cases are Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia; Altitude Express v. Zarda; and R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

 


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4 Comments

  1. The monotony of carbon-copy corporate boardrooms!

    In 2015 corporate America already floated the same message. So, now, back to the photocopy machine for the same ol’ “creative destruction.”

    As broadly reported and rewarded in the media four years ago, AT&T and Verizon, Dow Chemical, Bank of America, General Electric, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, and the San Francisco Giants, were among nearly 400 prophet-motive companies filing briefs to SCOTUS favoring the oxymoron same sex “marriage”—and thereby giving a whole new meaning to the term: bottom line.

    In 2015 it was argued that the absence of homosexual households in the economy would mean “an estimated cost to the Gross National Product of over ONE BILLION dollars per year.”

    Only 200 firms this time around? Someone post-vegetative and literate in the back room must have done the math…

    The sought-after new market niche (one Billion dollars) is only ONE-THIRTIETH of ONE PERCENT (0.00033) of the annual federal budget (three Trillion dollars). And at twenty-three Trillion dollars (not counting unfunded liabilities of ten times this amount) the national debt is a full 23,000 times as great as the squinty-eyed one Billion dollars.

    And, for the missing pocket change, judicial sycophants turn millennia of rational thought, culture, history and so-on upside down (“homophobes”!). Now it’s all about the quarterly business report. But, hey, if Congressional budget-gurus don’t understand decimal points, surely SCOTUS can be seduced by a bunch of headless letterheads.

  2. What a load!

    The dollar, and not how that proposal will devastate religious liberty is the only concern here.

    And it won’t be “not unreasonably costly or burdensome for business” if the business is a religious business or a corporation with a Christian charter???

  3. Neither Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation were in the minds of America’s Founding Fathers when they drafted the US Constitution.

  4. The Human Rights Campaign is a lobbying group funded by George Soros’s Open Societies Foundation -(to which he has donated 18-19 billion dollars.) Corporations are pressured to comply with HRC’s guidelines for workplaces friendly to homosexual/transsexual employees. That awards companies points on the HRC Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index that they can use to advertise & promote their business.

    Although only 3.% of the U.S. population identify as LGBT, they have a buying power of $830 billion. So that’s an important part of this story.

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