President Donald Trump acknowledged a 'very powerful' decision by the U.S. Supreme court in a landmark case protecting the employment rights of gays and transgender people – saying Monday the government will 'live with' the decision.
'They’ve ruled and we’ll live with the decision,' Trump told reporters at the White House hours after the ruling.
He called it a 'very powerful decision actually,' without explicitly stating whether he agreed with the court's reasoning on a case where the majority cast aside the arguments put forward by his administration.
The High Court ruled Monday that civil rights law protects gay and lesbian people from discrimination in employment, a resounding victory for LGBT rights from a conservative court.
The court decided by a 6-3 vote that a key provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 known as Title VII that bars job discrimination because of sex, among other reasons, encompasses bias against gay and lesbian workers.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed by President Donald Trump, authored the majority opinion, in which he was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts.
'An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex, Gorsuch wrote.
'Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids,' he added.
The 6-3 ruling represented the biggest moment for LGBT rights in the United States since the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.
The Supreme Court cases involved two gay men and a transgender woman who sued for employment discrimination after they lost their jobs. Only one of the men is still alive to see the ruling.
The Trump administration has argued that sexual orientation and gender identity are not covered by the Civil Rights Act.
The three dissents came from Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh - the more recent of Trump's two appointees.
'The Court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous,' Alito wrote in the dissent. 'Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination because of 'sex' is different from discrimination because of 'sexual orientation' or 'gender identity.''
Kavanaugh wrote in a separate dissent that the court was rewriting the law to include gender identity and sexual orientation, a job that belongs to Congress. Still, Kavanaugh said the decision represents an 'important victory achieved today by gay and lesbian Americans.'
The three cases being considered as one by the justices hinged on whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applied. The law makes it unlawful for an employer 'to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.'
In recent years, some lower courts have held that discrimination against LGBT people is a subset of sex discrimination, and thus prohibited by the federal law.
U.S. Appeals Courts were split on whether the statute applied to sexual orientation.
But the the Supreme Court's majority decision says that it does.
Gorsuch, for the majority wrote: 'An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.
'Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.'
