By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to interpret Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include job protections for LGBTQ people provides an interesting contrast between conservative political opinion and conservative judicial philosophy, according to a University of Kansas law professor.
"Justice Neal Gorsuch drafted the majority opinion," said Lumen "Lou" Mulligan, Earl B. Shurtz Research Professor of Law at The University of Kansas. "Justice Gorsuch was appointed to the court by President Trump. Justice Gorsuch wrote his opinion using very traditional, judicial conservative ideology, focusing on the text of the statute and its meaning."
Mulligan notes that Gorsuch quotes from dictionaries of the time that the law was written in an effort to understand what Congress meant when they passed the law.
"It cleaves out two different views of how one reads statutes," Mulligan said. "Do you read it in its very traditional, judicial conservative way, which Justice Gorsuch and Chief Justice Roberts do and say, I just look up the words, I look up the definitions and I apply it, or do you look at what the outcomes were intended by the people who drafted the statute?"
An example in his opinion that may be illustrative of why Gorsuch came down where he did on the case.
"Imagine an employer has two employees, Hannah and Bob," Mulligan said. "Both Hannah and Bob are attracted to men, and you fire Bob. Justice Gorsuch says, well, you fire Bob because of his sex. Not because of his sexual orientation or anything else. You have two characteristics that are the same in these two employees and you fire Bob precisely because he's male. He says that's just what these words mean. It doesn't really matter what the Congressmen or women intended."
If Congress wants to change the law, it has the power to do so, as this was not a decision based on the Constitution, but rather on the wording of a statute, but it has had since 1964 to make that change and has not.