Court Opinion

ID: 9489210
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:09:05.012326+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:23.941390
License: Public Domain

BATCHELDER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
Title VII prohibits an employer from intentionally taking any adverse employment action against an employee on the basis of a protected attribute of that employee. ' Because most of the attributes protected under Title VII are both facially clear from the language of the statute and obvious, if not immutable, as a matter of fact, the requirement that the discrimination be intentional is neither ambiguous nor unfair in most Title VII situations, and, indeed, serves as a protection for the employer. An employer cannot argue, with a straight face, that he did not understand from the statute that he could not discriminate against an employee because the employee was, for example, black, or female or Russian Orthodox. In the present ease, however, the protected attribute is not expressly set out in the statute, and no court, at the time Holland Hospitality, Inc., discharged Turic, had included a “per-pended” or “pondered” or even a contemplated abortion as an attribute protected by the statute. In part, of course, that is because a “perpended” or “pondered” event is not an attribute at all, but a thought.
It is not readily apparent from the language of the statute that thoughts are intended to be covered by its protections. For that matter, it is not readily apparent from the statute that the status of having had an abortion is a protected attribute. As a matter of logic, however, I can accept the conclusion that since the condition of pregnancy is specifically protected, and the EEOC regulations state that the status of having undergone an abortion is protected, the contemplation of the choice to undergo an abortion must also be protected under Title VII. It is nonetheless troubling to conclude, as the next step, that discrimination based on the employee’s contemplation of an abortion is “unlawful intentional discrimination” that results, not only in an award of backpay under Title VII, but an award of compensatory damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1981a.
That is particularly so here, where Turic was the center of the vortex and the employer terminated her to get rid of the source of *1217the uproar. However, because Turic’s contemplation of an abortion was the reason for the uproar, Turic’s termination (and thus the unlawful discrimination) was, at least in part, due to the “perpended abortion.” Since the statute makes no exception for discriminatory acts that an employer would not reasonably have known to be prohibited, Turic’s discharge, therefore, was “unlawful intentional discrimination.”
I concur in the majority opinion only because, in light of the specific language of 42 U.S.C. § 1981a, I can find no basis on which to hold that Holland Hospitality, Inc., had to have knowledge that Turic’s thoughts were protected under Title VII in order for its action to be a violation of the statute.