Section 7

Citation: Section 7
Parent Document: Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020)
Jurisdiction: United States (federal)
Effective Date: 2020-06-15
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4760997/bostock-v-clayton-county/ ↗

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in the 1960s—often may be seen as unexpected. But to re-
fuse enforcement just because of that, because the parties
before us happened to be unpopular at the time of the law’s
passage, would not only require us to abandon our role as
interpreters of statutes; it would tilt the scales of justice in
favor of the strong or popular and neglect the promise that
all persons are entitled to the benefit of the law’s terms. Cf.
post, at 28–35 (ALITO, J., dissenting); post, at 21–22
(KAVANAUGH, J., dissenting).
  The employer’s position also proves too much. If we ap-
plied Title VII’s plain text only to applications some (yet-to-
be-determined) group expected in 1964, we’d have more
than a little law to overturn. Start with Oncale. How many
people in 1964 could have expected that the law would turn
out to protect male employees? Let alone to protect them
from harassment by other male employees? As we acknowl-
edged at the time, “male-on-male sexual harassment in the
workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress
was concerned with when it enacted Title VII.” 523 U. S.,
at 79. Yet the Court did not hesitate to recognize that Title
VII’s plain terms forbade it. Under the employer’s logic, it
would seem this was a mistake.
  That’s just the beginning of the law we would have to un-
ravel. As one Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
(EEOC) Commissioner observed shortly after the law’s pas-
sage, the words of “ ‘the sex provision of Title VII [are] diffi-
cult to . . . control.’ ” Franklin, Inventing the “Traditional
Concept” of Sex Discrimination, 125 Harv. L. Rev. 1307,
1338 (2012) (quoting Federal Mediation Service To Play
Role in Implementing Title VII, [1965–1968 Transfer
Binder] CCH Employment Practices ¶8046, p. 6074). The
“difficult[y]” may owe something to the initial proponent of
the sex discrimination rule in Title VII, Representative
Howard Smith. On some accounts, the congressman may
have wanted (or at least was indifferent to the possibility
                 Cite as: 590 U. S. ____ (2020)          29 Opinion of the Court

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