On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that plaintiffs in “majority” groups cannot be forced to clear a higher bar to prove they were discriminated against than minority plaintiffs.
The case originated from a heterosexual woman, Marlean Ames, who sued the Ohio Department of Youth Services, which runs the state’s juvenile correctional system, after she was passed over for a promotion and subsequently significantly demoted in favor of two gay candidates with less education and experience than herself. Two lower courts ruled against her, arguing that she had failed to clear a higher bar to prove discrimination set for plaintiffs from majority groups. Both courts found that she had not provided “background circumstances” showing that “the agency was the rare employer who discriminates against members of a majority group,” according to the Supreme Court Opinion.
While the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of Ames’ discrimination claim, they did rule that the lower courts’ “background circumstances” standard was unconstitutional and inconsistent with federal civil rights law, which protects all individuals equally, regardless of whether they belong to majority or minority groups.
“As a textual matter, Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in the Court’s opinion. “By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’—without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group—Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas noted that he joined Jackson’s opinion “in full,” adding that he also wanted to “highlight the problems that arise when judges create atextual legal rules and frameworks.” Thomas argued that, when courts come up with “atextual requirements,” it creates confusion and difficulty enforcing those rules.
After a series of high-profile split decisions on key culture war issues, this unanimous decision is a strident affirmation that—regardless of the justices’ differences on what constitutes racial discrimination—civil rights laws protect all people equally from discrimination, regardless of what demographic traits they have.
