Not Voting in November Is a Sign of Unbelievable Privilege
By: Jessica Lynn
Tags: Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Voting, LGBTQ, Election 2020

If you need just one reason to vote for Biden in November, look to last week’s Supreme Court ruling that federal law protects LGBTQ workers from discrimination. This is the most significant ruling on LGBTQ civil rights issues since the Supreme Court decision affirming the legal right for same-sex couples to get married. If you want to ensure that this law sticks for the long haul, vote for Joe Biden in November.

Republicans understand something that Democrats can’t wrap their heads around, the importance of the Supreme Court.

As Russell Berman points out in The Atlantic,

“Conservatives have prized the Supreme Court as much if not more than Congress and the presidency for decades.”

Democrats don’t vote with only the Supreme Court in mind. Far too often, we need to be moved to get to the polls, feel a sense of “passion” or love for our candidate, while Republicans grab power and appoint more conservative judges. How about we take a page from Republications and think less about passion and more about practicality and law.

We can’t make a change if we can’t get into the room where change is made.

SupremeCourt.gov,

“Hamilton had written that through the practice of judicial review, the Court ensured that the will of the whole people, as expressed in their Constitution, would be supreme over the will of a legislature, whose statutes might express only the temporary will of part of the people.”

Republicans understand POTUS has the power to nominate Supreme Court justices to the court, and they remain seated for decades.

An appointed and confirmed Supreme Court Justice can only be removed by impeachment for bad behavior or retirement. That’s it. Or, they die. So there are three ways — impeachment, resignation, or death.

Until one of those three things happens, they remain there, writing and handing down laws that affect people’s lives. Supreme Court cases form the moral fabric and bones of our society and our country for decades.

Last Monday’s ruling is just one example of how those marginalized in our society are the most vulnerable and at-risk of four more years of this administration.

Trump lost in court — a few times

This landmark ruling will extend protections to millions of workers nationwide. It is a defeat for the Trump administration, which argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination based on sex did not extend to claims of gender identity and sexual orientation.

The Trump Administration believes it should be legal for an employee to fire a person from their job based on their perceived sexual orientation, it was legal in most states, as of last week, on June 15, 2020.

Trump lost.

The ruling came down to 6–3.

The majority of the ruling was written by Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch — sitting in the stolen Merrick Garland seat.

It was opposed by Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote one of the two dissents. Kavanaugh voted in the minority that is should still be legal all over the country for your boss to fire you if he or she thinks you are gay or trans. Kavanaugh was outvoted.

Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion. He writes,

“An employee 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. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

A clear understanding of the law.

“Sex discrimination involves treating someone (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because of that person’s sex.

Discrimination against an individual because of gender identity, including transgender status, or because of sexual orientation is discrimination because of sex in violation of Title VII. For more information about LGBT-related sex discrimination claims, for more information see,

http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/wysk/enforcement_protections_lgbt_workers.cfm.”

Millions of dark money dollars were spent by the conservative group Judicial Crises Network, an organization staffed and funded by longtime anti-LGBT operatives to block Merrick Garland’s nomination and millions more pushing Neil Gorsuch’s.

Gorsuch writes in the ruling,

“An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.”

That Gorsuch interpreted the law according to its plain meaning, is upsetting many on the right. I won’t applaud him here for doing the awesome job he was appointed to do as a Supreme Court justice — to interpret the law in its actual meaning. Too many get kudos these days for doing the right thing.

This decision should hold for a while.

Trump still at it

Trump and his administration are still doing everything they can to make the lives of LGBTQ people as miserable and dangerous and unprotected as possible.

On June 12, 2020, the Friday before Monday’s landmark ruling, President Trump made it explicitly OK for health care providers to refuse services to transgender people.

Amid a pandemic, this is what he is spending his time on.

Trump is so inept he can’t get coronavirus tests into nursing homes where 45,000 of the most vulnerable Americans have died in the last four months. Trump can’t figure out any kind of infection control protocal for prisons — even for the staff. Yet, he can whip up a new federal rule change so that trans people can be affirmatively discriminated against by health providers — because that’s a problem for Americans. Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about, there’s just not enough discrimination against trans people in health care! Damn it!

You know what you can do to ensure the end of Trump hurting the most marginalized in our society, those barely hanging on? You can cast a ballot for Biden in November who will nominate more liberal judges to the Court, the only Democrat on the ballot who has the best shot at defeating Trump.

Your other choice is Trump.

Besides becoming the President yourself, the single impact you can make is voting — not even ranting will change anything more than voting will.

If those who sat out in 2016 because they didn’t “like” everything about the Democrat nominee had just voted instead of having temper tandems, we would never have seen a Trump Presidency and all the damage it brought in its wake and continues to bring.

Every day he is in office.

Trump has made it clear he doesn’t care about LGBTQ rights; he can’t even say the letters in the correct order without getting tongue-tied.

If you care about the lives, bodies, and rights of those in society who don’t have the luxury of wasting their vote, vote for Biden in November.

It is a simple choice. Just as it was last time.