Will the conservative majority Supreme Court abandon Anthony Kennedy’s support for equality?

The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments this week on whether the 55-year-old federal civil rights law extends job protections to LGBTQ workers nationwide.

Percolating in lower courts for the past decade, the arguments will reach the high court in two cases involving gay men fired after their sexual orientation was discovered and a transgender woman fired after she related her plan to report for work in women’s clothes.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs and for LGBTQ and civil rights groups are arguing that the provision in Title VII in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination “because of sex” necessarily applies as well to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

It is an open question whether Roberts Court conservatives who take a strict textualist approach to statutory construction will agree. But the Trump administration is siding with the employers in the three cases by arguing that Congress did not intend to protect LGBTQ workers in 1964.

Yale law professor William Eskridge calls the cases “textualism’s moment of truth,” but confesses uncertainty about the eventual decision. “There may be four or even five Roberts Court judges who will say we’re going to leave the LGBTQ advocates to the legislative process,” he says.

The cases are the first to be argued before the Court since…

Read full story, and more, from Source: Will the conservative majority Supreme Court abandon Anthony Kennedy’s support for equality?