GOP opposition to LGBTQ rights cooling, even in Texas
Emmett Schilling, the executive director of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, has his work cut out for him — and he knows it.
“The overall goal is that trans folks, including black trans folks and trans people of color, are in a position of the same comfort, security and access to opportunity and success as our white cisgender counterparts,” Schilling said Tuesday morning during a Zoom call. “That’s equality, right?”
Achieving that goal, he continued, will require cultural change as well as political action and legal reforms.
“When we’re talking about real change, for me it doesn’t hang on SCOTUS,” Schilling said, referring to the high court. “It hangs on a neighbor that might not understand all the terminology about trans-ness, but I’m not scared to tell them that I’m trans and I’m not scared to tell them what I do.”
Still, he took a moment to absorb the fact that the Supreme Court on Monday had handed down a landmark ruling in favor of LGBTQ rights. Six of the court’s nine justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch, both conservatives, had concluded that it’s unlawful for employers to dis
criminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
“It’s still a little unbelievable,” said Schilling. “I was not anticipating such an extremely favorable ruling. I especially was not anticipating that that decision was going to be authored by Gorsuch.”
Americans on both sides of the aisle can agree with that.
“I’m trying to digest it,” said state Rep. Briscoe Cain, a Republican who represents part of east Harris County.
He explained that he’s reached out to Josh Blackman, a professor at the South Texas College of Law, for his analysis of whether the court overreached.
“The process is what matters,” Cain said. “We have the separation of powers in this country for a reason.”
The case at issue, Bostock vs. Clayton County, concerned several examples of employment discrimination against LGBTQ Americans.
George Bostock, for example, was fired from his job as the child welfare services coordinator in Clayton County, Ga., after he began participating in a gay softball league, which his employer deemed “unbecoming.”
Writing for the majority, Gorsuch argues that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is ultimately a form of discrimination on the basis of sex, which was outlawed
by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,” he wrote.
This is cut-and-dry reasoning on Gorsuch’s part. But his opinon outraged some conservatives, including Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote a 100-page-long dissent accusing his colleagues of legislating from the bench and, to boot, refusing to be honest about it.
A similar sense of betrayal was palpable among conservatives who had considered Gorsuch, tapped for the high court in 2017 by President Donald Trump, to be on their team — or at least loyal to their agenda. And some social conservatives took issue with the ruling itself.
“Sex now means transgender, but transgender remains undefinable. Got it everyone?,” tweeted state Rep. Matt Schaefer, a Republican of Tyler.
“Protection for women discarded w/ this ruling,” he added.
Most Republican elected officials, however, were oddly circumspect.
And, Schaefer notwithstanding, those who did bash the ruling tended to focus on the process that led to the ruling, rather than its substance or impact.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, blasted “the judicial rewriting of our laws,” much as he did after the high court’s landmark gay marriage ruling in 2015.
“Six un-elected and unaccountable judges instead took it upon themselves to act as legislators, and that undermines our democratic process,” said Cruz, a Republican.
Such reactions were illuminating, in a sense. Few Republican elected officials, in Texas and elsewhere, are openly supportive of LGBTQ rights. Just two GOP legislators — state Rep. Sarah Davis of Houston and state Rep. Todd Hunter of Corpus Christi — are joining Democrats to call for passage of a statewide LGBTQ anti-discrimination bill next year. But the number who are openly hostile to LGBTQ rights may be dwindling. That’s progress, even if it’s not the cultural change that Schilling and others are fighting for. And there’s still plenty of work to be done addressing discrimination against LGBTQ Americans in areas such as housing and health care.
And the social conservatives who were outraged by the Supreme Court’s ruling might consider taking their cues from Trump, who has been more an example of politics making strange believers than a true believer in their causes.
“They’ve ruled. I’ve read the decision. And some people were surprised. But they’ve ruled and we live with their decision. That’s what it’s all about. We live with the decision of the Supreme Court,” Trump said on Monday.
“Very powerful. A very powerful decision, actually,” he added.
Trump was right in this case.