For 10 years, Gerald Bostock worked for a government program that helped neglected and abused children in Clayton County, Georgia, just south of Atlanta.
“My employer loved the job I was doing,” says Bostock. “I got favorable performance reviews. We had great success.”
But Bostock, 55, says that all began to change in January 2013, when he joined a gay recreational softball league. “Within months of that, there were negative comments about my sexual orientation,” he says.
In June 2013, he was fired. Bostock says he lost his job because of his sexual orientation, and he argues that’s in violation of federal laws against discrimination. Jack Hancock, a lawyer for Clayton County, denies that Bostock’s firing was based on his sexuality. But the county also argues that it would be justified in firing someone because of their sexual orientation.
“When Congress prohibited sex discrimination in employment approximately 55 years ago,” Hancock says, “it did not simultaneously prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.”
Despite a string of Supreme Court victories for the gay rights movement over the past two decades, in more than half of U.S. states, businesses can still fire employees for being gay.
In the Bostock case, the Court will consider whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects employees from workplace discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and religion, also provides that guarantee to gay and transgender people.
It will be the court’s first case on L.G.B.T.Q. rights since the retirement last year of Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in all four of the Court’s major gay-rights decisions, siding with the Court’s liberal justices.