Only last Tuesday, Lawyers from the Department of Justice argued in court, that employers are within their constitutional right to fire LGBQT workers.
The case being litigated was involving a late skydiving instructor by the name of Donald Zarda, who was fired by his company Altitude Express when they found out he was gay. Mr. Zarda sued the company, but since his death in 2014 during a skydiving accident, his case is now being handled by his estate.
Attention towards this case has caused some public commotion, mostly because the current administration is using the DOJ, to protect businesses that deem non-straight sexual orientation enough reason to fire an employee, that is all by all means already protected under ‘Title VII’, of the the Civil Right Acts of 1964, a federal law that prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion.
“It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer … to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
— Title VII, Civil Rights Act of 1964
The DOJ’s lawyer, Hashim Mooppan had the nerve to tell the Second Circuit judges that, “Employers under Title VII are permitted to consider employees’ out-of-work sexual conduct. There is a common sense, intuitive difference between sex and sexual orientation.”
The DOJ along Altitude Express are not even trying to make it look like Donald Zarda was fired for some type ‘inappropriate conduct‘ or complaints, his firing wasn’t based on poor performance, or for showing up late, he was fired solely for being gay.
With such a straight-forward law in place, how could the DOJ even be fighting this? Well, back in July, when Jeff Session was head of the Justice Department, he filed a dirty legal briefing to desecrate ‘Title VII’ by excluding ‘sexual orientation’ from its definition.
This has now turned into a bloody and expensive battle that has pitted two federal agencies against each other, with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission going head-to-head with DOJ in a case that before July would have never ever proceeded.
This of course it’s not the first time a company has fired someone for being gay, there is conflicting precedents for Title VII’s protections. Just in April the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in April that Title VII did protect gay people from discrimination, finding any other interpretation “confusing and contradictory.”