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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the other—as the majority opinion does—misapprehends
common language, human psychology, and real life. See
Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College of Ind., 853 F. 3d 339,
363 (CA7 2017) (Sykes, J., dissenting).
   It also rewrites history. Seneca Falls was not Stonewall.
The women’s rights movement was not (and is not) the gay
rights movement, although many people obviously support
or participate in both. So to think that sexual orientation
discrimination is just a form of sex discrimination is not just
a mistake of language and psychology, but also a mistake of
history and sociology.
   Importantly, an overwhelming body of federal law re-
flects and reinforces the ordinary meaning and demon-
strates that sexual orientation discrimination is distinct
from, and not a form of, sex discrimination. Since enacting
Title VII in 1964, Congress has never treated sexual orien-
tation discrimination the same as, or as a form of, sex dis-
crimination. Instead, Congress has consistently treated sex
discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination as le-
gally distinct categories of discrimination.
   Many federal statutes prohibit sex discrimination, and
many federal statutes also prohibit sexual orientation dis-
crimination. But those sexual orientation statutes ex-
pressly prohibit sexual orientation discrimination in addi-
tion to expressly prohibiting sex discrimination. Every
single one. To this day, Congress has never defined sex dis-
crimination to encompass sexual orientation discrimina-
tion. Instead, when Congress wants to prohibit sexual ori-
entation discrimination in addition to sex discrimination,
Congress explicitly refers to sexual orientation discrimina-
tion.5
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  5 See 18 U. S. C. §249(a)(2)(A) (criminalizing violence because of “gen-

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