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Page Number: 32

28 

BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY 

Opinion of the Court 

in the 1960s—often may be seen as unexpected.  But to re-
fuse enforcement just because of that, because the parties 
before us happened to be unpopular at the time of the law’s
passage, would not only require us to abandon our role as
interpreters of statutes; it would tilt the scales of justice in 
favor of the strong or popular and neglect the promise that 
all persons are entitled to the benefit of the law’s terms.  Cf. 
post,  at  28–35  (ALITO,  J.,  dissenting);  post,  at  21–22 
(KAVANAUGH, J., dissenting).

The employer’s position also proves too much.  If we ap-
plied Title VII’s plain text only to applications some (yet-to-
be-determined)  group  expected  in  1964,  we’d  have  more
than a little law to overturn.  Start with Oncale.  How many
people in 1964 could have expected that the law would turn
out to protect male employees?  Let alone to protect them
from harassment by other male employees?  As we acknowl-
edged at the time, “male-on-male sexual harassment in the
workplace  was  assuredly  not  the  principal  evil  Congress
was concerned with when it enacted Title VII.”  523 U. S., 
at 79.  Yet the Court did not hesitate to recognize that Title 
VII’s plain terms forbade it.  Under the employer’s logic, it
would seem this was a mistake. 

That’s just the beginning of the law we would have to un-
ravel.  As one Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 
(EEOC) Commissioner observed shortly after the law’s pas-
sage, the words of “ ‘the sex provision of Title VII [are] diffi-
cult to . . . control.’ ”  Franklin, Inventing the “Traditional 
Concept”  of  Sex  Discrimination,  125  Harv.  L.  Rev.  1307,
1338  (2012)  (quoting  Federal  Mediation  Service  To  Play 
Role  in  Implementing  Title  VII,  [1965–1968  Transfer 
Binder] CCH Employment Practices ¶8046, p. 6074).  The 
“difficult[y]” may owe something to the initial proponent of 
the  sex  discrimination  rule  in  Title  VII,  Representative 
Howard Smith.  On some accounts, the congressman may 
have wanted (or at least was indifferent to the possibility