Next Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in two cases that present the issue whether the landmark federal statute that bars certain discrimination in employment—Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—prohibits employers from firing people because of their sexual orientation. Taking the opposite position of the federal agency responsible for administering Title VII, the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice has entered the case on the side of the defendant employers to argue the statute’s prohibition on discrimination on the basis of “sex” does not encompass sexual-orientation discrimination.

Whether people can be fired because of their sexual orientation is an issue that comes to the court following a 20-year stretch in which it delivered a string of groundbreaking decisions advancing legal protections for gays and lesbians. In 1996 the court invalidated a state constitutional amendment that sought to foreclose any branch or political subdivision of the state from protecting persons against discrimination based on sexual orientation; in 2003 it invalidated laws criminalizing consensual sexual activity in the home between those of the same sex; and in 2013 it invalidated a federal statute to the extent it barred the federal government from treating same-sex marriages as valid even when they were lawful in the state that licensed them. Finally, in 2015 came the momentous decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S.Ct. 2584 (2015), recognizing the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry.

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