Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[delphonso]

The idea that he chose not to fall so he didn't give Fake News anything is amazing.

Just be a fucking human. We all do that thing when we trip where we pretend to start jogging for no reason.

[Max™]

Nevermind, I don't care.

[JoshuaFH]

The idea that he chose not to fall so he didn't give Fake News anything is amazing.

Just be a fucking human. We all do that thing when we trip where we pretend to start jogging for no reason.

Maybe he wants to do the Kim Jong Il thing where he insists that he's a divine-being born in a volcano with no faults whatsoever.

[martinuzz]

Well that's one of way of explaining the smell of sulfur around him.

[Uthimienure]

You know, I heard Ginger Rogers could walk down a ramp backwards while drinking water one handed in heels!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

What a dancer!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Actual good news time - SCOTUS rules that employment protection exists for LGBT people, 6-3. Gorsuch and Roberts defected, Gorsuch actually wrote the ruling, and I'm pretty confident now that those two are trying to build a center bloc on the court.

[misko27]

Well that's surprising and marvelous news.

[McTraveller]

It is heartening to see that we are codifying "don't use attributes not related to a job in hiring/firing considerations."

What's less heartening is all the meta-governance involved.  Lots of interesting political science stuff about strict textural interpretation of laws, Constitutional interpretation theories, and "should the SCOTUS be defining terms, or force Congress to do it."

[Lord Shonus]

This is the nature of one of the two dissents- that if the text of the law is now considered obsolete, it is up to Congress to rewrite it, not the Court to impose change by decree. In many cases, this would be a reasonable argument, but this is a straightforward 14th Amendment issue - "No state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." LGBT+ people were being denied equal protection of the law, so this is entirely within the confines of the Amendment.



Of equal import, NYT polling shows that Republicans are the least likely to support the decision, with "only" 74% favoring employment protection for gay people and 69% favoring employment protection for trans people. These are low compared to Independent (84 and 79) or Democrat (90 and 84) percentages, but still overwhelming. The Conservative pundits bemoaning the decision are pissing into the hurricane here.

[Lord Shonus]

Double-posting because this is just as big a deal. The Supreme Court also denied cert in cases involving attempts to get rid of California's Sanctuary Cities and force local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE. Lower courts had ruled against the Feds, and denying cert will allow those rulings to stand.

[TamerVirus]

I just find it kinda fascinating that the discriminatory business at the center of this ruling is a skydiving company of all things.
And how the Zarda in Altitude Express, Inc. v. Zarda is currently deceased after BASE jumping into a mountain in Switzerland

[da_nang]

Actual good news time - SCOTUS rules that employment protection exists for LGBT people, 6-3. Gorsuch and Roberts defected, Gorsuch actually wrote the ruling, and I'm pretty confident now that those two are trying to build a center bloc on the court.

From what I'm reading about Gorsuch's opinion, if that ends up being the final case law, then there's still a logical loophole.

If the employer intentionally relies in part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to discharge the employee—put differently, if changing the employee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the employer—a statutory violation has occurred.

[...]

If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague.

(Emphasis mine)

If I understand correctly, you can still ban homosexuals as long as that includes both homosexual men and homosexual women. You can't just fire gays exclusively, or lesbians exclusively, since now you are discriminating based on sex.

In fact, isn't Gorsuch's argument a false equivalence? Since he's comparing a homosexual man and a heterosexual woman. In other words, he's making the obvious and correct conclusion that banning an androsexual man but not an androsexual woman is sexual discrimination, but that's not the problem at hand i.e. that banning homosexuals is sexual discrimination.

Or at least, it's not what the media is making it out to be. At best, the solution is incomplete.

Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth.

Isn't this the same argument as well? In fact, he--intentionally or not--says it himself:

Take an employer who fires a female employee for tardiness or incompetence or simply supporting the wrong sports team. Assuming the employer would not have tolerated the same trait in a man, Title VII stands silent.

In other words, if you fire a male X and a female X, you're in the clear. But if you only fire a male X but not a female X, then you're in deep shit.

So why the mix-up of the traits? Did he botch the logic or is he playing a different game here?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Some have suggested that Gorsuch is attempting to emulate a ploy that Scalia enacted in this case, which was intended to make claims of discrimination impossible by way of "everything is discrimination, so nothing is". But that ploy failed then, and I don't see why it would now either.

I don't think the loophole you're describing exists as such. We have "An X dates a woman and you Y." X is man/woman, Y is fire/not fire. You would have to fire straight men alongside gay women to avoid discrimination claims. Else you have to ban dating entirely.

[da_nang]

I don't think the loophole you're describing exists as such. We have "An X dates a woman and you Y." X is man/woman, Y is fire/not fire. You would have to fire straight men alongside gay women to avoid discrimination claims. Else you have to ban dating entirely.

Sort of making my point there. "An X dates a woman and you Y" means you would have to fire all gynosexuals (if "dates" is treated as "is attracted to").

But that's not homosexuality. Sexuality isn't "attracted to male" or "attracted to female" (androsexual and gynosexual, resp.), it's "attracted to the same sex".

So if you're going to fire a homosexual, you would have to fire all homosexuals--men and women--to avoid discriminating based on sex. Hence the loophole.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

But it's not a loophole. It's logically impossible to fire your gay or trans employees without tripping this line unless you also fire your straight employees (or all men/women, which is separately illegal, in the case of firing trans employees). Gay men and gay women aren't attracted to the same people.