US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2688

What’s the next frontier in discrimination law? For more than 40 years it’s been illegal across the country to discriminate on the basis of race and sex—and for almost as long, advocates have been trying to add one more category: sexual orientation.

Congress has consistently balked at adding protections for gays and lesbians, and the Supreme Court has never officially moved from its longstanding position that it’s acceptable to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation so long as the government shows a “rational basis” for its actions. (This year’s same-sex marriage decision was narrowly a ruling on people’s right to marry, not about discrimination per se.)

But two basketball players at Pepperdine, and a court in California, have just changed the rules.

The players, Haley Videckis and Layana White, say that their coach and other university staff suspected them of being in a lesbian relationship and systematically harassed them on that basis. According to Videckis and White, the coach on several occasions interrogated each of them about their sexual habits and told them that lesbianism would not be tolerated on the team; they also say he manipulated team rules to prevent the two of them from being able to play.

When they sued, they relied on Title IX, the section of the Civil Rights Act that guarantees women can’t be treated differently in colleges (technically, at any institution receiving federal funds) because of their sex. Title IX doesn’t mention sexual orientation, but Videckis and White argued that that doesn’t matter: discrimination against them on the basis of sexual orientation is really sex discrimination, and therefore prohibited.

Why? Here’s the thinking: If either of them had been a man, their coach would have had no trouble at all with the fact they were dating women. He only minded when women dated women. And punishing a woman for doing something that it would be acceptable for a man to do is sex discrimination, plain and simple.

On Tuesday, the federal district court in Los Angeles endorsed this theory, agreeing that their coach’s behavior would constitute sex discrimination and that Videckis and White could sue on these grounds, and the case can now proceed. Indeed, the court embraced the larger theory that all sexual-orientation discrimination is sex discrimination.