Legal Expert Blasts Supreme Court’s “Dangerous” LGBT Ruling

In an interview with Breitbart News this week, Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network said that the Supreme Court’s new ruling, which retroactively makes “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” part of what’s covered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, will open the door to a “tsunami of new litigation” against religious institutions, conservative business owners, and anyone else who rejects the left’s new standards of LGBT inclusion.

“The Supreme Court left a lot of really important issues open, like, how do you balance this with religious freedom?” Severino explained. “How do you balance it with freedom of speech? If you’ve got a law, for example, saying that using someone’s preferred pronoun is mandatory — or you can be fined [for non-compliance], how do we balance that with some of these other important and even constitutional questions? Those are things that, for the most part, are unfortunately going to be just decided by a whole range of lower courts. and it will be a long time before the Supreme Court even takes up the opportunity to weigh in on that.”

Severino went on to dive into the details of the ruling, which involved “updating” the Civil Rights Act using modern-day interpretation in the precise way that judges like Neil Gorsuch are supposedly committed to avoiding.

“This had to do with the court interpreting the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Severino said. “We’re kind of familiar with this language. It says that no employers can discriminate on the basis of sex, of religion, of natural origin, and other kinds of classic caveats that you have, but what their question was, ‘It says you can’t discriminate on the basis of sex. Does that also mean you can’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity?’

“What the Supreme Court did is, in an opinion, they basically just rewrote what that text said because there is a long-standing history where for decades, no politicians [and] no judge said that language meant sexual orientation, as well,” Severino noted. “That’s really a revisionist reading of the statute dressed up as textualism, and that’s one of the things that is so dangerous because we have laws that courts can effectively rewrite.”

Regardless of what you may think about whether or not sexual orientation or gender identity should be covered by federal anti-discrimination laws, the fact remains that they are not. And they will not be until Congress passes laws that explicitly makes it so.

That’s not what happened here.

What happened here was that six unelected judges decided to put words and thoughts into the mouths and minds of congresspeople from 1964, knowing full well they weren’t thinking about transgender people when they passed the Civil Rights Act. That’s judicial activism at its most blatant, and it’s extremely disappointing coming as it does from a supposedly “conservative” court.