Be careful what you wish for. Recall that in the employment discrimination case decided earlier this year ( Bostock v. Clayton County), the Court majority, including Gorsuch, ruled that federal law prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ workers. Gorsuch is probably the Court’s most vocal proponent of “textualism,” a bedrock conservative view that the meaning of a law turns on its words alone, not on the intentions of those who drafted the legislation. The Bostock case forced Gorsuch to decide between his own conservative social policy beliefs and following the broad language of a landmark civil rights law. Gorsuch didn’t simply honor his textualist approach in Bostock; he wrote the majority opinion
Specifically, that case required the Court to apply the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, which literally forbids employment discrimination that occurs “because of [an employee’s] race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
Its fairly clear that the drafters 55 years ago had no intention of banning discrimination against LGBTQs (indeed that probably had no idea of what the Ts and Qs were even about) Gorsuch unabashedly ruled that only the literal text of the statute and NOT the expectations of lawmakers mattered. Thus, he and the majority (liberal justices) ruled that the words of the statute clearly prohibited employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
I’ll acknowledge this was an anomaly in is generally siding with the conservatives and he is no David Souter but there are other cases coming up where a similiar textualist approach may yield some very unexpected results.
