Marlean Ames in her lawyer’s office in Akron, Ohio, on February 20. Ames claims that she was transmitted for a job because she is a hetero woman and that homosexuals received positions for whom she was more qualified.
Maddie McGarvey for the Washington Post via Getty Images / The Washington Post
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tilting legend
Maddie McGarvey for the Washington Post via Getty Images / The Washington Post
A unanimous supreme court was shaved with an Ohio woman who said she was discriminated against at work because she is hetero.
The sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had already taken the side of its employer, the Ohio Department of Youth Services.
In the case, there was a legal standard used by certain federal circuit courts which impose a higher bar to prove discrimination on heterosexual, white and / or men only on minorities.
“The congress has left no room for the courts to impose specific requirements on the group complainants mainly alone,” wrote Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the three Liberals of the Court, in unanimous opinion.
Brown wrote that the upper standard of the lower court was incompatible with title VII of Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination at work.
The woman in the case, Marlean Ames, said that the Ohio Youth Services Department, where she had worked for 20 years, had passed it to promote – then downgraded it – because she is hetero. In both cases, jobs were given to LGBTQ +people.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of these federal circuits which obliged non-minorities to show a higher standard of discrimination, ruled against it. On Thursday, the Supreme Court reassured himself with Ames and canceled this higher standard.
Ames now has another chance of asserting his file before the lower court with the lower standard to prove discrimination.
