Court Opinion

ID: 9763104
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 02:36:41.519485+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:29:39.415321
License: Public Domain

SMITH, Judge,
dissenting.
If the extraordinary views espoused by the Majority and its creation of the “customer gender privacy” theory were permitted to represent the law of this Commonwealth, the compelling interest in combatting discrimination would be severely compromised which may once again rear its invidious head in places of public accommodation throughout the Commonwealth.
The legislature of this Commonwealth has declared in Section 2 of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act, 43 P.S. § 952, that it shall be the public policy of this Commonwealth to eradicate wherever possible discrimination against persons or groups of persons which “undermines the foundations of a free democratic state”; and pursuant to Section 5 of the Act, 43 P.S. § 955, it shall be unlawful to discriminate under the circumstances in this case. Absolutely nothing in the language or intent of the Act or in any of the employment-related cases relied upon by the Majority can legitimately support the exception to the Act’s prohibition which the Majority has carved out to justify discrimina*134tion in places of public accommodation. To extend a “privacy right” to a woman’s purely voluntary and personal choice to exercise at LivingWell to reshape her figure is unquestionably outside the ambit of one of the most basic and fundamental principles of law.