Supreme Court’s Neil Gorsuch pulled Missouri, Kansas into this century on LGBTQ rights

When the Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch gets out ahead of you, Missouri and Kansas, well, you may have fallen more than a little behind.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ workers from job discrimination. Neither Missouri nor Kansas has managed to pass a state law assuring that very basic protection.

But in his majority opinion, Gorsuch wrote that 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.”

Finally. Many people assumed this was already against the law, and before long, the fact that it was ever legal to fire someone for who they are or who they love is going to seem as jarring and anachronistic as the sight of ashtrays on airplane armrests. This ruling was needed because such discrimination isn’t the relic we’d like to think it is.

In 2015, a state appeals court in Missouri dismissed a claim by a Kansas City-area man who said his employer, a paper recycling company, fired him for being gay. Too bad, so sad, the court said, as it was bound by “the state of law as it currently exists.”

Darin Coffman, of Gladstone, Missouri, whose April wedding to his longtime partner was postponed by COVID-19, said that to him, “This is bigger than gay marriage because not everybody wants to get married, and this affects people of all ages.” The breaking news bulletin on Monday morning not only caught him by surprise but provoked “instant goosebumps and tears.”

Coffman, who is 45, grew up in the tiny town of Green City, Missouri, west of Kirksville, feeling that “I could never go to work anywhere up there” without fear of discrimination. “That’s mainly why I moved to Kansas City.”

Seven years ago, he left a job at an Excelsior Springs car dealership after his gay supervisor was, he believed, fired over his sexual orientation.

And the kind of abusive behavior that’s harder to legislate away still happens too, of course. Even in downtown Kansas City a few years ago, Coffman said, someone threw trash on him and his partner out of a passing car as they were walking down the street holding hands.

Even now, it remains legal in Missouri and Kansas to evict or refuse to serve someone over their sexual orientation or gender ID, and maybe with Neil Gorsuch to guide them, conservative state lawmakers will come around on that injustice.

A federal lawsuit filed in 2018 by a married lesbian St. Louis-area couple, alleging discrimination by a retirement community that would not allow them to move in, was dismissed by a federal judge just last year.

Missouri state Rep. Greg Razer, one of the few openly gay state lawmakers in Missouri, said he thinks housing discrimination will be the next dam to break.

“We’re so close behind the scenes,” even though year after year — and decade after decade, for a total of 22 years — proposed anti-discrimination laws have gone nowhere. He draws hope from, and sees a connection with “this and Black Lives Matter, and how thoughts on that changed with one video.”

Today, though, Razer said, is one to celebrate: “I’m thinking, ‘What time can I bust open a bottle of wine?’’’

In Kansas, where anti-discrimination laws have also gone nowhere, Republican former Gov. Sam Brownback repealed an executive order that had extended anti-discrimination protections to state employees. As soon as Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly took office last year, she reimposed the order. But now, no matter who is in office, these protections can never vary or be threatened.

U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, the first openly LGBTQ Kansan elected to Congress, said in an interview that it was refreshing to “see a piece of good news today.” And yes, she was surprised, given “the direction this administration has gone.”

“It’s pretty wild to think in Kansas, I can be the representative to Congress, and it also is OK for me to be fired from a job.”

Because of high suicide rates among LGBTQ young people, she said, “I literally think of this as the kind of stuff that can save lives.”