WASHINGTON, D. C. – Attorney General Karl A. Racine has joined 15 other attorneys general in filing a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that employment discrimination based on sexual orientation violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the brief filed with the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in the case of Horton v. Midwest Geriatric Management, LLC, the coalition urged the court to join a growing number of federal appellate courts in recognizing that Title VII’s workplace protections extend to sexual orientation.
Attorney General Racine and the other attorneys general argued that recent federal appellate court decisions are based on the plain wording of Title VII, decades of U.S. Supreme Court precedent and common sense. The coalition adds that there is potential danger in deciding otherwise, as state laws outlawing sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace cannot protect residents who cross state lines to work in other states that lack similar laws.
The coalition argued that Title VII clearly prohibits discrimination that would not have occurred “but for” an employee’s sex – a definition at the heart of discrimination based on a worker’s sexual orientation. Attorney General Racine and the other attorneys general emphasized that sexual orientation discrimination is improper because it is based on the sex of the individual with whom an employee associates, a type of discrimination the Supreme Court has long found to be unlawful.
As the coalition’s brief states: “In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court held that an anti-miscegenation law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, concluding that the State of Virginia could not prohibit marriages on the basis of a racial classification. Here, as in Loving, Horton alleges that he was subjected to discrimination based on his association with a member of a protected class, except that sex, rather than race, is the protected class at issue. In other words, treating a man who loves a man worse than a man who loves a woman is a form of sex discrimination.”
Attorney General Racine and the other attorneys general encouraged the 8th Circuit to recognize that sexual orientation discrimination amounts to discrimination based on an employee’s failure to conform to sexual stereotypes associated with their group.
Joining Attorney General Racine in filing the brief were the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.