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Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

From my layman’s view, they argued that the existing law did not cover sexual orientation, while the 6 argued that “on the basis of sex” does despite lawmakers making no mention of it in the bill.

That’s not such a wild stretch, but it is reading more into the law than was written or intended at the time, so peeling 2 textualists off is a bit surprising.

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I think the majority opinion is more interesting than that. They argue that firing someone for being LGBT is firing them for behavior that you would not have fired them for had they been a different sex. Ergo, it inherently is firing them on the basis of sex.

Yes it is interesting. Most likely not what the lawmakers intended at the time, but the law itself doesn't limit the scope.

It's a great outcome, but unfortunate that it takes the Supreme Court to get there.

> Yes it is interesting. Most likely not what the lawmakers intended at the time, but the law itself doesn't limit the scope.

There's a section in the majority opinion about this, actually - I would paraphrase it as "it's not surprising that broad outcomes are drawn from laws written in extraordinarily broad terms."

Title VII covers other things that the majority opinion describes as "conceptually distinct" from sex but also "necessarily entail(ing) discrimination based on sex". In particular, they talk about sexual harassment and motherhood discrimination.

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