Monday, July 22, 2019

Can LGBT People Be Legally Fired?

Did you know that there are three significant cases on the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket for this fall about whether LGBT people are worthy of equal opportunity or whether they may be treated as legally inferior citizens?

The Court will hear oral arguments in October about whether LGBT people will continue to have protections under federal nondiscrimination law, or whether it would be legal under federal law for employers to fire LGBT people just for who they are or whom they love. These cases will impact the ability of LGBT people to provide for themselves and their families.

Today, MAP released a new brief, “Can LGBT People Be Legally Fired? U.S. Supreme Court Considers Three Cases That Could Take America Backward” highlighting what’s at stake with these cases.

Together, the cases have the potential to take America backward. That’s because if the Court rules that LGBT people are not protected by existing federal workplace protections, anti-LGBT opponents will rapidly use the same legal reasoning to work to attempt to overturn critical federal protections in housing, healthcare, credit, education and more. In short, LGBT people could soon find themselves living in a nation where federal law says it is legal for them to be denied a job, fired, discriminated against at school, denied a loan, rejected by a doctor, and evicted from an apartment — simply because they are LGBT.