The Supreme Court now has the chance to settle whether federal law safeguards LGBT people from workplace discrimination, which has split courts around the country and left a patchwork of legal protections in the wake of those divisions.
At least nine federal circuit courts ruled in decisions prior to 2007 that sexual orientation wasn’t covered by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits bias against workers and job applicants based on their “sex.” The tide began to shift in 2015, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decided in a federal sector case that Title VII does apply ...