Most people do not know what it is like to repeatedly hit refresh on a browser at 10 a.m. the last couple of Mondays in June each year, wondering if the United State Supreme Court will decide whether "Equal Justice Under Law" actually applies to them. So it was again this year for me, waiting, then rejoicing that SCOTUS has declared in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia that LGBT people cannot be fired from their employment for being, well, LGBT. Happy Pride month, indeed.

Before Bostock, an LGBT person could be terminated from employment in 30 states just because they were LGBT. Indeed, the employer could actually say: "You are fired because you are…" LGBT—which was the actual fact pattern in the three cases consolidated and heard together under Bostock. However, there was a time where the legal environment in the United State was unforgiving everywhere for LGBT employees. In particular, an extraordinary pattern of gay and lesbian discrimination has been documented among school teachers and government employees reaching back to the 1940s.

We can discuss academics and analyze legal principles, but the real story here is that it is 2020 and we are finally just getting around to requiring that LGBT people be secure from the whims of bigotry in the workplace by saying they have a right to be employed. Women had to wait until the 1980s and people of color were graced with statutory and common law equality in the 1960s. Of course, we all know that equality comes not in the formal pronouncement, but in the interpretation and implementation of a statute or decision in the community. None of those groups has true equality yet or, more importantly, equity.

It should seem ridiculous that this is even a "thing." In 150 years it will be an amusing historical relic that any minority community must brief and beg, then wait pensively until the same point each year to learn whether nine ultimate political officials decide if another part of their lives deserves dignity. This year's game-show-door-number-two spectacle was brought to us by Clayton County, GA, a place that could easily have been the set location for the movie "Deliverance" or where Bo & Luke Duke outran Roscoe P. Coltrane and Jefferson Davis Hogg each week in the 1980s. Yet, Clayton County in 2020 was the hill where LGBT employment discrimination finally had to die, something that is both sad and fitting.

Many pundits have spilled ink these past few weeks since the Bostock decision dropped, discussing its internal conservative cat fight over "textualism" between Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Alito, the latter two in separate dissents. In an almost cinematic legal debate discussing pirate ships and Justice Alito's Appendix B list of how the sky is falling under dozens of federal statutes, they addressed whether Title VII's prohibition of discrimination "based on … sex" actually means you cannot discriminate against someone in employment because of a sex-based characteristics or stereotype. Textualism is, of course, fancy-speak for "definition," or literal, plain meaning. It is lauded as a profound analytical school of thought supposedly invented by Justice Scalia, the same guy who liked to make cheeky jokes about "pole sitting" during SCOTUS oral arguments on de-criminalizing sodomy as if he was on an elementary school playground.

To understand both Justices Kavanaugh's and Alito's perspective, you need a time machine. They posit that the meaning of words and the utility of their purpose are frozen in time at the moment of adoption. For example, the logical extension of their theory would be that African Americans were only three-fifths of a person until the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted in 1865 (unless they were in prison servitude, and then they were still a fraction of a person until 1968 upon adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment). Justice Gorsuch imposes a more elastic interpretation that avoids the need for donning a powdered wig. He simply looks to the plain meaning of words, even if the drafters did not have a certain interpretation in mind when a law was drafted.

Setting aside the academic debate, let us acknowledge LGBT people used to have it really bad in the workplace. Horribly bad. In the early 1950s, Senator McCarthy, well-known for his anti-communism activism, separately embarked on an ambitious program to eventually terminate over 500 gay men from federal government service, declaring them "sexual perverts." This so-called "Lavender Scare," was managed by Roy Cohn, the famously closeted lawyer who befriended Donald J. Trump in the future president's formative years. In 1957-1965, Florida legislators created the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, or "John Commission," to execute a gay purge among public school teachers. In that time, while sidestepping Due Process and hearing rights, the Commission engaged in a campaign of investigation and interrogation resulting in over 200 teachers losing their jobs and teaching credentials. As local discrimination laws were enacted sporadically in the 1970s, a backlash developed and focused on school teachers and government employees.

Those efforts turned a corner for the better in 1978 when 58.4% of California residents voted down a statewide ballot initiative seeking to ban gay men and lesbians from public school teaching positions. That referendum, California Proposition 6, was called the "Brigg's Initiative," in honor of the conservative legislator who championed it. When it was first proposed, the Brigg's Initiative enjoyed widespread support and appeared destined for passage. Then Harvey Milk and others launched a statewide "No on 6" campaign, which was supported by Governor Ronald Reagan and President Jimmy Carter.

Proposition 6 provided that a California public school teacher, teacher's aide, administrator, or counselor could be fired if the employee was found to have engaged in either: (1) "public homosexual activity" (which the initiative defined as an act of homosexual sex which was "not discreet and not practiced in private, whether or not such act, at the time of its commission, constituted a crime"); or (2) "public homosexual conduct," which the initiative defined as "the advocating, soliciting, imposing, encouraging or promoting of private or public homosexual activity directed at, or likely to come to the attention of, schoolchildren and/or other employees."

The Brigg's Initiative included a due process component that is laughable in retrospect, providing a formal procedure to oversee the determination of what actually constitutes homosexual activity or conduct. An employee would be terminated if the school board, after a hearing, determined by a preponderance of the evidence that the employee had engaged in "public homosexual activity" or "public homosexual conduct" and "that said activity or conduct render[ed] the employee unfit for service." The factors that the reviewing board would consider in the determination of "unfitness for service" would include, but not be limited to:

(1) the likelihood that the activity or conduct may adversely affect students or other employees; (2) the proximity or remoteness in time or location of the conduct to the employee's responsibilities; (3) the extenuating or aggravating circumstances which, in the judgment of the board, must be examined in weighing the evidence; and (4) whether the conduct included acts, words or deeds, of a continuing or comprehensive nature which would tend to encourage, promote or dispose schoolchildren toward private or public homosexual activity or private or public homosexual conduct.

So as the rest of the legal world ponders Constitutional Equal Protection and Due Process interpretation; theorizes how this new Bostock Title VII jurisprudence will extend to other areas of federal law; and continues to debate esoteric, high-brow analyses like textualism, allow your empathy to consider how silly it all seems that it took this long to come to this. Think of me and others refreshing our browsers at 10 a.m. on Mondays in June each year, hoping the next click will show us we have achieved, as New Jersey native and Equal Rights Amendment drafter Alice Paul put it, "ordinary equality." Congratulations and Happy Pride. It is 2020 and LGBT people finally cannot be fired from their employment for being LGBT.

Thomas H. Prol is a partner at Sills Cummis & Gross, P.C. in Newark, a member of the governing body of the American Bar Association, and the first openly gay leader of the NJ State Bar Association.  These opinions are his own.