Court Opinion

ID: 9494817
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:47:49.4518+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:38.497424
License: Public Domain

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
In this case, the majority holds that Tommy Schroeder, an openly homosexual teacher who was subjected to severe harassment on the job, cannot survive summary judgment on his claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 that defendant Hamilton School District and some of its administrators violated his rights under the Equal Protection' Clause of the United States Constitution. In my view, this holding and the rationale both the majority and concurrence have used to reach it are inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s recognition in Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 116 S.Ct. 1620, 134 L.Ed.2d 855 (1996), that the Equal Protection Clause does protect homosexuals as a class and that this protection may not be denied simply because they may be an unpopular class in a given state or local community. I therefore respectfully dissent.
Because the majority has already furnished many of the relevant facts, I will simply highlight those that appear especially important to me. First, there is no dispute that Schroeder was a very good teacher; he taught successfully for the District for 22 years. Whatever psychiatric problems he may have had, see ante at 950, 956 (majority opinion), it is clear that he had them under control until the unrelenting harassment to which he was subjected on the job caused him to have a full mental breakdown on February 11, 1998. He left the school that day a ruined man; when it became apparent that he could not return, the District terminated him. His vulnerability in no way excuses the District for the well-known reason that tort-feasors take their victims as they find them. See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 461 (1986 App.); see also Brackett v. Peters, 11 F.3d 78, 81 (7th Cir.1993) (“It has long been the rule in tort law (the ‘thin-skull’ or ‘eggshell-skull’ rule) not only that the tortfeasor takes his victim as he finds him, but also that psychological vulnerability is on the same footing with physical.”).
In addition, Schroeder complained repeatedly to the school officials about the vicious harassment the students and occa*960sionally others directed toward him. Compare Frazier v. Delco Electronics Corp., 263 F.3d 663, 666 (7th Cir.2001); Haugerud v. Amery School Dist., 259 F.3d 678, 700 (7th Cir.2001); Adusumilli v. City of Chicago, 164 F.3d 353, 361 (7th Cir.1998) (all recognizing that an employer is only liable under Title VII for co-worker harassment if it is negligent, and that this normally means the employee must bring the harassment to the employer’s attention). See also Davis v. Monroe County Bd. of Educ., 526 U.S. 629, 119 S.Ct. 1661, 143 L.Ed.2d 839 (1999) (holding that private damages are available in a suit based on Title IX of the Education Act only where the funding recipient acts with deliberate indifference and the harassment is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to the educational benefit or program). His efforts to alert the District to the problem and to seek redress eliminate any possibility of the District’s defeating this claim of intentional discrimination through a claim of lack of knowledge.
Despite the majority’s efforts to find remedial efforts in the District’s generalized responses, it is plain that the District never in any way took action specifically designed to inform the students that certain words or phrases that reflect negative views about homosexuals were out-of-bounds, nor in any other way did it tell them that harassment or discrimination based upon Schroeder’s sexual orientation was impermissible. It would have been easy enough, as part of the philosophy of “courtesy to all” that the majority advocates, to prohibit certain words or actions without a detailed discussion of the sexual behavior of adults.
Finally, the District treated the class of homosexuals differently from the way it treated other classes, such as racial minorities or gender, as illustrated by the memorandum it circulated cautioning the community to avoid “offensive racial and/or gender related words or phrases.” Even the majority concedes this, ante at 953, when it admits that the District had no policy against discrimination based on sexual orientation and did have such policies against other forms of discrimination. Since even this court believes that discrimination based on sexual orientation is not “gender-related,” see, e.g., Spearman v. Ford Motor Co., 231 F.3d 1080, 1084 (7th Cir.2000), there is every reason to think that the students of the Hamilton School District might have thought the same thing and concluded that the District’s policy did not require them to avoid what is often referred to as gay-bashing.
The majority acknowledges that the core violation of the Equal Protection Clause is “precisely the selective withdrawal of police protection from a disfavored group.... ” Ante at 957 (concurrence). See also Village of Willowbrook v. Olech, 528 U.S. 562, 120 S.Ct. 1073, 145 L.Ed.2d 1060 (2000) (per curiam) (recognizing that even a “class of one” may state a claim ■under the Equal Protection Clause). It also appears to admit that homosexuals might constitute one such group. Ante at 950 (majority opinion); ante at 957 (concurrence). Indeed so, as the Supreme Court’s Romer decision makes clear. And, it is worth noting that Romer is the only decision from the Supreme Court in recent years to address an equal protection argument where the class of homosexuals were singled out for uniquely disfavored treatment. Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186, 106 S.Ct. 2841, 92 L.Ed.2d 140 (1986), looked only at the question whether the enforcement of the Georgia sodomy statute violated the fundamental rights (meaning substantive due process rights) of homosexuals in that state. The Court was careful to note that it was not addressing any equal protection argument. See id. at 202-03 n. 2, 106 S.Ct. 2841. In Webster v. *961Doe, 486 U.S. 592, 108 S.Ct. 2047, 100 L.Ed.2d 632 (1988), the Court considered the question whether an avowedly homosexual man could bring a lawsuit against the Director of Central Intelligence, who had fired him expressly because he was homosexual. The Court concluded that the plaintiff had no claim under § 102(c) of the National Security Act, 50 U.S.C. § 403(c), because the Director’s termination decisions were committed to agency discretion (as that term is used in the Administrative Procedures Act, 5 U.S.C. § 701), but it remanded for further proceedings on the plaintiffs constitutional claims, including his claim based on the Equal Protection Clause. The later case of Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640, 120 S.Ct. 2446, 147 L.Ed.2d 554 (2000), dealt with the question whether the First Amendment associational rights of the Boy Scouts organization would be infringed if it was compelled to accept a scout leader it did not want. In that case, the reason the Boy Scouts did not want respondent Dale in its organization was Dale’s sexual orientation. But the Equal Protection Clause naturally enough did not figure in the Coui’t’s opinion because the Boy Scouts is a private organization and thus not a “state actor” for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment. That leaves us with Romer as the governing Supreme Court decision on the applicability of the Equal Protection Clause to the class of homosexuals.
Nothing in Romer justifies a system under which a state or state actors like the District and its officials deliberately either omit altogether or give a diminished form of legal protection from verbal or physical assaults to individuals in certain disfavored classes. Yet both the majority opinion and the concurrence see no problem in the fact that the defendants intentionally responded less vigorously to the abuse that finally broke Schroeder than they themselves would have done for others. In fact, the majority seriously understates the case. Never, in the course of these events, did the administration ever attempt to dissuade either students, parents, or anyone else in the broader community of the school district, to refrain from discrimination or harassment based upon sexual orientation. Indeed, as I have already noted, school officials never even told the students that the words being used to describe Schroeder transgressed the general code of civility the majority is recommending to schools. Schroeder was just told to tough it out. The majority also makes the unwarranted factual finding that there was no evidence of hostility to Schroeder. Even a glance at the facts the majority itself has set out shows that this is, at a minimum, a disputed point of fact.
Last, the majority seems to believe that a lack of resources might have prevented the District from responding to Schroeder’s complaints. See ante at 950 (majority opinion); ante at 954 (concurrence). This cannot be a serious point. Adding two words, “sexual orientation,” to the memorandum that was circulated could hardly have added a second to the secretarial time involved, nor could it have added appreciably to the amount of toner consumed by the photocopying machine. This case is nothing like Equality Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, Inc. v. City of Cincinnati, 128 F.3d 289 (6th Cir.1997), on which both of my colleagues rely heavily. Equality Foundation was a case in which the court upheld the city’s refusal to include homosexuals in a specially protected class, whereas here the only thing Schroeder wants is the same treatment that everyone else is receiving — that is, the kind of treatment to which the Constitution entitles him, according to Romer v. Evans. The glaring absence of the words “sexual orientation” in the memorandum, coming on the heels of the offensive incidents and Schroeder’s complaint about exactly that *962kind of harassment, implies official tolerance, if not endorsement, of the behavior in which the students and others had been engaging. As I believe the majority acknowledges, the mere fact that members of some religious groups think that homosexuality is immoral also in no way excuses a public school’s tolerance of harassing conduct based on sexual preference. Some religions profess beliefs that are incompatible with the individual guarantees found in the Bill of Rights, as we have seen to our sorrow in the recent history of the Taliban group in Afghanistan, whose views about the role of women in society could never be adopted by a public body here. In this country, nondiscriminatory secular norms of conduct ordinarily prevail even if they conflict with particular religious beliefs or practices. See, e.g., Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872, 878-79, 110 S.Ct. 1595, 108 L.Ed.2d 876 (1990); Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158, 64 S.Ct. 438, 88 L.Ed. 645 (1944); Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. (8 Otto) 145, 25 L.Ed. 244 (1879).
I do not disagree that each case of harassment or discrimination must be evaluated on its own facts. Nor do I quarrel with the proposition that proper allocation of investigative resources may require devoting less time and effort to some complaints than to others. That decision, however, must be made on a case-by-case basis. Systematically to put cases involving harassment based on homosexuality (or any other recognized classification) below the threshold for any action at all amounts to the kind of differential unfavorable treatment that the Equal Protection Clause reaches. I had thought that Nabozny v. Podlesny, 92 F.3d 446 (7th Cir.1996), which the majority hardly discusses and the concurrence attempts to distinguish, settled the point that sexual orientation discrimination could not be treated in such a cavalier fashion.
Schroeder has shown that he suffered harassment so severe that he experienced a total mental breakdown; he has shown that a reasonable trier of fact could find that the school district officials acted intentionally when they failed to respond to his complaints; and he has shown that the trier of fact could also infer that his unfavorable treatment occurred because of his homosexuality. This is more than enough, in my view, to allow him to proceed to trial in his ease against the District. I would Reverse the district court’s judgment and Remand for that trial.