On Tuesday, Oct. 8, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in three cases that will determine whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects LGBT workers.

Two of these cases center on discrimination against employees based on their sexual orientation. More simply put, the court will be looking to answer the question of whether it is sex discrimination if an employer fires Don, but not Donna, for dating men. The third case, concerning the firing of transgender funeral director Aimee Stephens, asks whether the firing of Stephens when she told the boss that she is transgender and will be coming to work as her true self was because of sex, given that the boss had been satisfied for years when she came to work as Andrew.

Advocates for the employees in the cases of Don Zarda and Gerald Bostock, two gay men, have analogized these cases to Title VII cases that declared it unlawful for an employer to discriminate against employees involved in interracial relationships. But lawyers for the employers often confuse the argument by talking primarily or exclusively about Loving v. Virginia, the landmark case that struck down laws against interracial marriages. Focusing on the constitutional Loving case causes the employers to misunderstand and misrepresent the Title VII argument. Zarda and Bostock's cases are not challenging marriage laws; Clayton County isn't enforcing some law prohibiting certain marriages. Instead, the Supreme Court is considering only whether the firings of Don Zarda and Gerald Bostock, over their attraction to men, was because of their being men.

There are eight relatively unknown cases—Parr v. United Family Life Insurance, Holcomb v. Iona College, Deffenbaugh-Williams v. Wal-Mart Stores, Tetro v. Elliot Popham Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick & GMC Trucks, Whitney v. Greater N.Y. Corp. of Seventh-Day Adventists, Holiday v. Belle's Restaurant, Gresham v. Waffle House and Reiter v. Center Consolidated School District—that do form the basis of the irrefutable analogy, under Title VII, between discrimination against employees in interracial relationships and employees in same-sex relationships.

According to their allegations, Don Parr, Craig Holcomb, Marilyn Holiday and Alene Gresham were fired because they had (or were believed to have) black spouses; Julie Deffenbaugh-Williams, because she had a black fiancée; Fred Tetro, because he had a biracial child; and Charlene Whitney, because of a social relationship with a black man. Sister Barbara Reiter alleged discrimination based on her "close association with the Spanish citizens of the district." They all have two things in common: they all successfully argued to the courts that Title VII covered the discrimination that befell them due to these interracial relationships.

And every last one of them is white.

That should doom the employers' arguments that Title VII focuses on the "ism" that motivates the employer (racism, sexism) and condemned only the favoring of whites over blacks in interracial relationship cases. Yes, each of the eight employers appears to have been motivated by anti-black racism in service of favoring whites generally (anti-Hispanic in Reiter). But under Title VII, that should mean that the white plaintiff loses. Instead, the relevant inquiry is whether the firing was because of the plaintiff's white race, and it was. Title VII says that it shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer "to discharge any individual … because of such individual's race," not "to discharge any individual … because of such employer's racism."

Before the eight cases, one court did get the analysis wrong by focusing on the underlying racism, and not on who the employer took action against. Ripp v. Dobbs Houses held Title VII unavailable to the white plaintiff fired for advocating for black workers; the rationale being that, if a claim is rooted in anti-black racism and white supremacy, how could a white employee say that he suffered discrimination because of his race?

In Deffenbaugh-Williams, the Fifth Circuit answered Ripp by holding that Julie was discriminated against "because of [her] race (white), as a result of her relationship with a black person." The Sixth Circuit rebuked Ripp by holding that "a white employee who is discharged because his child is biracial is discriminated against on the basis of his race, even though the root animus for the discrimination is a prejudice against the biracial child." The other six cases rejected Ripp by name.

And we know the eight cases are correct, because the Supreme Court ruled that men can sue under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, enacted to amend Title VII to stop misogynistic second-class treatment of pregnancy benefits. The employer in Newport News gave second-class pregnancy benefits to the dependents of employees, mainly spouses and children. Since only wives need the benefits, the employees who were injured were men (the only folks with wives back then). So male employees had a PDA claim regarding their wives, but no claim for shortchanging their daughters, because their female co-workers were equally likely to have a pregnant daughter. So the "because of such individual's race or sex" requirement does matter, but the root bigotry of the employer does not.

Another employer argument is that other nondiscrimination statutes have an "association" provision, and Title VII doesn't. This would be a very good argument if the interracial relationship was a pure associational argument. But it isn't. Under Title VII, the trait of the fired employee must have played a part in the firing. By contrast, if an employer proclaims that "no employee of mine shall marry someone of North Korean descent," an employee who does and gets fired has no Title VII claim for that firing, because that employee's national origin was irrelevant. Of course, that is never the case in a sexual orientation claim; the sex of the employee is always relevant; it is only the combination of the employee's sex and the sex of the person they are romantically involved with that motivates the employer's action.

Gregory Nevins is the Employment Fairness Project director at Lambda Legal. Nevins successfully argued that Title VII sex discrimination protections extend to LGBTQ workers before the Second and Seventh circuits.