Big business to Supreme Court: Defend LGBTQ people from bias

NEW YORK (AP) — More than 200 corporations, including many of America’ best-known companies, have signed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that federal civil rights law bans job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The brief, announced Tuesday by a coalition of five LGBTQ rights groups, is being submitted to the Supreme Court this week ahead of oral arguments before the justices on Oct. 8 on three cases that may determine whether gays, lesbians and transgender people are protected from discrimination by existing federal civil rights laws.

Among the 206 corporations endorsing the brief were Amazon, American Airlines, Bank of America, Ben & Jerry’s, Coca-Cola, Domino’s Pizza, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Nike, Starbucks, Viacom, the Walt Disney Co. and Xerox. Two major league baseball teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Tampa Bay Rays, were among the group.

In their brief, the companies argued that a uniform federal rule is needed to protect LGBTQ employees equally in all 50 states.

“Even where companies voluntarily implement policies to prohibit sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, such policies are not a substitute for the force of law,” the brief argued. “Nor is the patchwork of incomplete state or local laws sufficient protection — for example, they cannot account for the cross-state mobility requirements of the modern workforce.”

Federal appeals courts in Chicago and New York have ruled recently that gay and lesbian employees are entitled to protection from discrimination; the federal appeals court in Cincinnati has extended similar protections for transgender people.

The question now is whether the Supreme Court will follow suit, given its conservative majority strengthened by President Donald Trump’s appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. The three cases are the court’s first on LGBTQ rights since the retirement last year of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored landmark gay rights opinions.

The Obama administration had supported treating LGBTQ discrimination claims as sex discrimination, but the Trump administration has changed course. The Trump Justice Department has argued that the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not intended to provide protections to gay or transgender workers.

The companies signing the brief represent more than 7 million employees and $5 trillion in annual revenue, according to the Human Rights Campaign, the largest of the LGBTQ rights groups organizing the initiative. Other organizers included Lambda Legal, Out Leadership, Out and Equal, and Freedom for All Americans.

“At this critical moment in the fight for LGBTQ equality, these leading businesses are sending a clear message to the Supreme Court that LGBTQ people should, like their fellow Americans, continue to be protected from discrimination,” said Jay Brown, a Human Rights Campaign vice president. “These employers know firsthand that protecting the LGBTQ community is both good for business and the right thing to do.”

In one of the cases heading to the Supreme Court, the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a gay skydiving instructor who claimed he was fired because of his sexual orientation. The appeals court ruled that “sexual orientation discrimination is motivated, at least in part, by sex and is thus a subset of sex discrimination.”