Charles Kaiser writes:

More quickly and more permanently than any other American institution, the United States Supreme Court has the capacity to set the tone for the treatment of any minority group, often for decades to come. It was a string of Supreme Court cases that transformed the status of black Americans, for example, most famously in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

The L.G.B.T.Q. legal establishment has spent the last generation following the model set by the black civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s. And it worked: The last 25 years have been a period of extraordinary progress for the rights of gays and lesbians and transgender people in America.

A series of Supreme Court decisions — striking down laws prohibiting sodomy, invalidating that part of the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman, and finally, the opinion that made marriage equality the law of the land — were extraordinary achievements for a movement that only came to the broad public consciousness after the Stonewall Riots in NewYork in 1969.

All of those decisions, however, were written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. Not only did Mr. Kennedy retire in 2018, but President Trump used the resulting vacancy to solidify the court’s conservative majority with Brett M. Kavanaugh, having previously added Neil Gorsuch as well. Combine that with the administration’s relentless assault on L.G.B.T.Q. rights — which began with a 2017 presidential tweet ordering the Pentagon to discharge all transgender service members and continued through last Friday with a new Health and Human Services regulation that would strip trans people of all the protections of the Affordable Care Act — and it’s clear why practically all of the movement’s progress suddenly seemed in jeopardy.

That’s what made the Supreme Court decision on Monday in three cases so momentous. The ruling made clear that the current Supreme Court would continue to affirm that certain rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are indeed as unalienable as everyone else’s. (Many legal experts believe the decision would also lead other courts to invalidate the newest H.H.S. regulation — and perhaps the new Pentagon rules as well.)

All three cases challenged the right to fire employees simply because they are gay or lesbian or trans. Associate Justice Gorsuch and Chief Justice Roberts joined the four progressive justices to change the cultural landscape, simply by affirming one of the most fundamental American legal principles: the only thing that should control the court’s decisions are the words on the page as Congress wrote them.

That core conviction made it possible for Justice Gorsuch to decide that it was irrelevant that no one in Congress was thinking about discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited job discrimination on the basis of “sex.”

As Carl Charles, a lawyer with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, explained to me, Justice Gorsuch ruled that “the limits of the drafters’ imagination supply no reason to ignore the law’s demands. When the express terms of a statute give us one answer and extratextual considerations suggest another, it’s no contest. Only the written word is the law, and all persons are entitled to its benefits.” [Continue reading…]