Jun 15 2020 11 mins 1
This is Gabriel Rench with your CrossPolitic Daily News Brief for Tuesday, June 16th, 2020. Fight Laugh Feast Conference in Nashville October 1-3 Before we getting into this news brief, I have some good news for you. In fact probably the only good news in this brief. Because of the COVIDcraze we are moving our early bird registration deadline for our Fight Laugh Feast Conference to July 31st. Registrations were obviously slow in April, but now they are humming along. We really don’t want you to miss out on coming to our conference, so we are extended early bird registration to get you there. This is obviously not about the money for us, we really do want an opportunity to bring all our friends together for some good fellowship, Psalm singing, and to hear from some high octane speakers to the glory of God and to the good of His people. So, don’t wait, sign up for our first annual Fight Laugh Feast Conference in Nashville October 1st through 3rd. Seating is limited. Go to Fightlaughfeast dot com and register today. Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/us/gay-transgender-workers-supreme-court.html New York times reports that: The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, handing the movement for L.G.B.T. equality a stunning victory. “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling. Until Monday’s decision, it was legal in more than half the states to fire workers for being gay, bisexual or transgender. The vastly consequential decision extended workplace protections to millions of people across the nation, continuing a series of Supreme Court victories for gay rights even after President Trump transformed the court with two appointments. The lopsided ruling, coming from a fundamentally conservative court, was a surprise. Justice Gorsuch, who was Mr. Trump’s first appointment to the court, was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. The decision, covering two sets of cases, was the court’s first on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights since the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in all four of the court’s major gay rights decisions. Proponents of these rights had worried that his departure would halt the progress of the movement toward equality. The case concerned Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sex. The question for the justices was whether that last prohibition — discrimination “because of sex”— applies to many millions of gay and transgender workers. Justice Gorsuch wrote that it did. “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex,” he wrote. “It is impossible,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, “to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the majority had abandoned its judicial role. “There is only one word for what the court has done today: legislation,” Justice Alito wrote. “The document that the court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive.” “A more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall,” he wrote. “The court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous.” The common understanding of sex discrimination in 1964, Justice Alito wrote, was bias agai [...]
