Free to be

Celebrate: Just as federal law forbids employers from discriminating on the basis of race, religion, national origin or sex, it likewise protects sexual orientation or identity. The stirring statement by the nation’s highest court affirms the rights of gay and transgender individuals to be who they are in the workplace, a step forward that may prove nearly as epochal as the one affirming that those who share the same pronouns may unite in marriage.

Neil Gorsuch is a Trump-appointed justice, a fact only relevant to those like the president who outrageously expect the third branch to show loyalty to the second. Yet just days after Trump’s executive passed a rule eviscerating the rights of transgender patients in health care, Gorsuch authored the 6-3 majority opinion pulling in the opposite direction. Good for him.

The other side, with circus-quality logical acrobatics, insists that long-established sex discrimination law has no bearing on sexual orientation or gender identity.

“It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex,” Gorsuch replied. “Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague.”

Precisely.