LGBTQ+

For over 60 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has been a battleground for LGBTQ+ rights, shaping...

By Madison Zucco and Luke Lamberti Around the country, Women’s Bills of Rights have emerged as a...

For the second time in just two months, the Chicago-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has issued a ground-breaking ruling that will have an enormous impact on countless gender discrimination cases involving LGBTQ people. In April, the Seventh Circuit overturned itself and broke ranks with its sister by holding that employment discrimination “because of sex,” which is prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, includes employment discrimination specifically targeting employees on the basis of sexual orientation.  As Kevin Love Hubbard previewed and as Andrew Melzer and I have discussed elsewhere, Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, will likely serve as a bellwether in the rapidly developing LGBTQ discrimination field.  While the decisions of the Seventh Circuit are only binding on federal courts in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin, the powerful and commonsense reasoning underlying Hively is already having an impact as far away as New York, where a district court judge recently adopted Hively’s reasoning in also concluding that Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, thereby giving the Second Circuit the opportunity to overturn its less LGBTQ-friendly case law as well. On May 30, the Court once again moved the bar for LGBTQ rights in Whitaker v. Kenosha Unified […]

Last month, President Obama signed an Executive Order barring federal contractors from discriminating against employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The Order simply adds sexual orientation and gender identity to a list of characteristics—race, color, religion, sex, and national origin—already protected under an Executive Order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and enforcement is to be handled by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Federal Contract Compliance Programs.  In a press release outlining the President’s action, the White House took pains to describe both employer and public support for LGBT workers in the workplace, including the fact that 91% of Fortune 500 companies prohibit sexual orientation discrimination and 61% prohibit discrimination based on gender identity.  Further, 63% of registered voters favor federal legislation protecting LGBT employees from workplace discrimination. This is the President’s second recent foray into lawmaking on behalf of American workers through the use of the Executive Order.  As Jenn Siegel wrote here earlier this month, July of 2014 also saw President Obama issued the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order.  That Executive Order addressed a range of federal contractors’ workplace practices, ranging from disclosing recent labor law violations to barring those employers whose government contracts exceed $1 […]