Former President Barack Obama used the Supreme Court’s decision to expand the definition of protected classes in employment discrimination to include homosexuals and transgender people as an opportunity to wish the country a “Happy Pride Month.”
“Today reminds us that progress might be slow. It might take decades. But no matter what things might look like today, it’s always possible. Happy Pride month, everybody,” Obama tweeted on Monday night.
The Twitter post included a photograph of the White House in 2015 lit up the rainbow colors of the gay political movement following the Supreme Court’s decision creating a right to gay marriage.
In Monday’s ruling, a 6-3 vote, the court declared that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits being discriminated against because of one’s sex, and similar actions taken against those for being homosexual or transgender is no different.
“An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court. “Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids."
In a sharp dissent, Justice Samuel Alito chastised the four widely considered liberal members of the court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Steven Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts and Gorsuch.
“The Court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous," Alito wrote in the dissent. “Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination because of ‘sex’ is different from discrimination because of ‘sexual orientation’ or ‘gender identity.'"
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