Members of the LGBTQ+ community in the United States are celebrating a major civil rights victory.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender can not be fired from their jobs or face any form of work-related discrimination, on the basis of sexual orientation or identity.
In a 6-3 ruling from the court, the justices said that these kinds of firings are a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on gender. NBC News reported that the high court's ruling upheld rulings in lower courts.
In an unexpected turn of events, the majority opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was President Donald Trump's first Supreme Court appointee.
"An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids," wrote Gorsuch, according to CNN.
Gorsuch joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the four liberal-leaning justices in the majority. They were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, pointed out that Title VII, when it was created, did not allow for protection against LGBTQ+ employees.
"Even if discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity could be squeezed into some arcane understanding of sex discrimination, the context in which Title VII was enacted would tell us that this is not what the statute's terms were understood to mean at that time.," wrote Alito.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh also dissented.
NBC reported that the ruling solidified those made in the lower courts, including the case of a Georgia man who was fired from his county job after joining a gay softball team, as well as the relatives of a New York man who was fired from a position as a skydiving instructor after telling a client he was gay.
