Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson shocked the legal world by authoring a unanimous Supreme Court decision protecting the last group anyone would have suspected.
The Supreme Court made headlines with a decision that nobody saw coming.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson found herself in an uncomfortable position.
And Ketanji Brown Jackson just did the unthinkable in one Supreme Court ruling that has the woke Left scrambling.
Supreme Court unanimously protects majority groups from workplace discrimination
In a shocking turn of events, all nine Supreme Court justices sided with a heterosexual woman who faced workplace discrimination because of her sexual orientation.
The case involved Marlean Ames, an employee at the Ohio Department of Youth Services.
Ames began her career there in 2004 as an executive secretary and was promoted to program administrator after a decade.
Her troubles started in 2019 when she applied for a different position.
Despite receiving positive performance evaluations from her gay supervisor, Ames was denied the job she applied for.
The department then delivered a crushing blow by demoting her to a position that paid half the hourly rate of her previous secretarial position.
What made this situation even more outrageous was that both the new position she applied for and the program administrator position she was demoted from were filled by gay employees.
Ames knew something wasn’t right and decided to fight back by filing a discrimination lawsuit.
The lower courts initially rejected her claims using what’s called the "background circumstances" rule.
This discriminatory rule forces members of majority groups to meet higher standards when proving workplace discrimination.
"If Ames had been in a minority group, all she would have to show to get a trial is that someone with a different sexuality was treated better," GianCarlo Canaparo from The Heritage Foundation explained to The Daily Signal.
"But because she is in a majority group, she must show ‘background circumstances to support the suspicion that the defendant is that unusual employer who discriminates against the majority,’" Canaparo added.
Justice Jackson strikes down discriminatory court rule
The Supreme Court unanimously rejected this unfair "background circumstances" rule that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had imposed to limit protections for majority group members.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered the opinion that demolished this two-tiered system of justice.
"As a textual matter, Title VII’s disparate-treatment provision draws no distinctions between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs," Jackson wrote in the decision.
Jackson continued by explaining that the law "makes it unlawful ‘to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.’"
The justice made it crystal clear that Congress intended equal protection for all workers regardless of their group status.
"By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’—without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group—Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone," Jackson added.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion that was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, showing the broad support for this decision across the Court’s ideological spectrum.
Woke Democrats face an uncomfortable reality
This ruling represents a major victory for equal treatment under the law and deals a significant blow to the Left’s obsession with identity politics in the workplace.
For years, woke activists have pushed the narrative that discrimination can only flow in one direction – from majority groups to minority groups.
The Supreme Court just demolished that false premise by unanimously confirming that the Civil Rights Act protects all Americans equally.
The decision in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services builds on the Court’s previous ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano from 2009, where justices ruled that discriminatory effects resulting from diversity efforts are illegal.
Xiou Wang, who represented Ames as director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law, argued that requiring members of majority groups to prove "background circumstances" only perpetuates workplace discrimination.
This ruling could have far-reaching implications for future "reverse discrimination" cases across the country.
Employers who have been engaging in discriminatory hiring and promotion practices under the guise of diversity and inclusion programs now face the reality that they can be held accountable for discriminating against any employee regardless of their demographic characteristics.
The unanimous nature of this decision sends a powerful message that equal treatment under the law isn’t a partisan issue – it’s an American principle that transcends political divisions.
Democrats who have spent years promoting identity-based hiring practices and reverse discrimination policies are now scrambling to figure out how to respond to this landmark ruling.
The Supreme Court just reminded everyone that the Civil Rights Act means what it says – no individual should face discrimination in the workplace because of their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
That protection extends to every American, not just those deemed to be in "minority" groups by political activists.
