Trump and the Promise of LGBTQ Equality

I’ve always got my head in the clouds

Hope that I could find

One of them that’s silver-lined

As I write, it appears that Donald J. Trump will take office as the forty-fifth President of the United States.  Some (many?) people, myself included, deeply feared this and are anxious or worse about the prospect.  So, in an effort to help myself confront this new reality, I offer this brief exploration of one possible way to deal with it.

“As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect LGBTQ citizens,” Trump promised in his nomination acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention in July 2016.  Americans should hold him to that promise.  It doesn’t mean, as Trump seemed to think, we should embrace blatantly unconstitutional anti-Muslim immigration policies.  But it could and should mean a great deal.

(Reuters/Carlo Allegri)

Trump’s promise to protect LGBTQ persons – and, yes, I’m deliberately overlooking his rhetoric extending solicitude to citizens, since the Constitution guarantees equal protection of the laws to persons, not just citizens – means he should support the Equality Act and use the power of the presidency to help it become part of the law of the land.  In 2000 he publicly supported amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ban sexual orientation discrimination (see his interview with The Advocate here); the Equality Act would accomplish much the same, but in a more comprehensive matter that would also protect against anti-transgender discrimination and that leaders on these issues in Congress believe would be most effective.

Trump’s promise to protect LGBTQ persons means he should abandon his intention to nominate Supreme Court Justices who would overrule the Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision, which held that the Constitution forbade government to exclude same-sex couples from legal marriage (aka “civil marriage”) on the same terms and conditions civil marriage is offered to different-sex couples.  The interaction of civil marriage and the U.S. legal order generally may be criticized on various grounds – why should any of us have to count on employment benefits that may or may not be offered in order to secure a basic right such as healthcare for us and our marital partners and children?  But so long as that is how the U.S. system is structured, LGBTQ people and our families will not be protected, and certainly not be protected equally with heterosexually identified persons, if we are denied access to or recognition of our marriages.

Trump’s promise to protect LGBTQ persons also means he should reject efforts to exempt us from the benefits of our state, local, and national antidiscrimination laws.  He should not repeal executive orders that forbid sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, which would expose us to the harms of the discrimination those orders are designed to prevent.  He should not support the so-called First Amendment Defense Act, which would grant a government sanctioned right to discriminate to people who disapprove of the marriages or other relationships of LGBTQ persons.  Such targeting of us is the opposite of protection.

There is much, much more that Donald Trump would have to do as President to live up to his promise to “do everything in my power” to protect LGBTQ persons.  Let us hope that he does.  And more than that, let us insist that he does.  Let us never let him forget his words.  Some of Trump’s campaign pledges were unjust; some were unconstitutional.  But the pledge to protect LGBTQ persons to his utmost extent is in itself noble, worthy of our constitutional order.  We all need to press our representatives in government to hold Donald Trump to this promise of equality.

Federal Courts Hold Oregon & Pennsylvania Marriage Exclusions Unconstitutional

 “Cause a double-rainbow is hard to find”

On two consecutive days, federal trial courts held unconstitutional state laws that excluded same-sex couples from marriage and refused to recognize lawful marriages of such couples from other jurisdictions.  On Monday, May 19, in Geiger v. Kitzhaber (opinion here), U.S. District Judge Michael J. McShane held that Oregon’s statutory and state constitutional marriage exclusions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Judge McShane’s order in the case permanently enjoined the state and county defendants from enforcing the laws, effective immediately.  (He declined to “stay” his judgment to put it on hold and keep same-sex couples from marrying, though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit could impose a stay, as could the U.S. Supreme Court.)  On Tuesday, May 20, in Whitewood v. Wolf (opinion here), U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III held that Pennsylvania’s statutes denying marriage to same-sex couples and denying recognition of same-sex couples’ valid marriages from other jurisdictions violated same-sex couples’ equal protection rights and their fundamental right to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.  Judge Jones likewise permanently enjoined the state and county defendants from enforcing those laws.  Following last week’s decision holding Idaho’s marriage exclusion unconstitutional, and the prior week’s ruling against Arkansas’s marriage ban, these Oregon and Pennsylvania rulings heighten the momentum of the national campaign for marriage equality and underscore the vacuity of the arguments for the continued denial of civil marriage to same-sex couples.

Some Geiger plaintiffs, from left, Lisa Chickadonz, Christine Tanner, Ben West and Paul Rummell.  Photo: Don Ryan/AP

In Geiger, the Oregon case, the state had refused to defend the state’s discriminatory marriage laws, concluding they were unconstitutional and joining the plaintiffs in asking the court to hold them unconstitutional.  The arguments against it were presented by amici curiae (“friends of the courts,” or interested persons or groups who are formally plaintiffs or defendants in the case) and were the same sorts of claims that are by now well familiar.  Like many other judges since the Supreme Court’s decision holding part of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional law summer in U.S. v. Windsor, the Geiger judge concluded that the potential justifications did not even satisfy “rational basis review,” the most deferential form of scrutiny.  (The judge in dicta rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the marriage laws classified on the basis of sex, which would subject them to a less forgiving “intermediate” or “heightened” form of scrutiny.  But his reasoning on this point, illogically trying to distinguish Loving v. Virginia, was neither persuasive nor necessary to his ruling, since he held that the laws fail even rational basis review.  Thus, this opinion should not even be persuasive precedent for the counter-intuitive proposition that laws that keep same-sex couples from marrying do not classify on the basis of sex.)

Applying rational basis review, the judge ruled, as have many others, that tradition arguments and moral disapproval were legally insufficient to uphold laws challenged as denying people equal protection on the basis of sexual orientation.  He also concluded that “[t]here is simply no rational argument connecting” a potential state interest in “natural” procreation or other child-welfare-focused interests to the state’s marriage bans, which undermine rather than advance the state’s interests in the wellbeing of all its children.  “The marriage laws place the plaintiffs and other gay and lesbian couples seeking to marry in Oregon at a disadvantage, and the laws do so without any rationally related government purpose.”  Thus, they violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, were unconstitutional, and were enjoined.

Two of the Whitewood plaintiffs, Angela Gillem and Gail Lloyd  Photo: ACLU

In the Whitewood case, Judge Jones applied “intermediate scrutiny” to the plaintiffs’ equal protection claim, a form of judicial review less deferential to the government; instead of asking whether the plaintiff had proven that the statute was not rationally related to a legitimate state purpose, intermediate scrutiny places the burden on the government to prove that a discriminatory law furthers not merely a legitimate purpose but one that counts as “important,” and that the law is not merely rationally but substantially related to such important purposes.  Because the proper level of scrutiny in the Third Circuit was not settled, the judge examined the various factors the Supreme Court had deemed relevant, such as a history of discrimination, the irrelevance of sexual orientation to people’s ability to contribute to society, and a relative lack of political power.  Interpreting the plaintiffs’ arguments not to be pressing for full “strict scrutiny” (as would be applied to racial discrimination), the court concluded that intermediate scrutiny was appropriate.  Applying that scrutiny, Judge Jones held that the state’s asserted interests in “the promotion of procreation, child-rearing and the well-being of children, tradition, and economic protection of Pennsylvania businesses” may or may not satisfy rational basis review but were not sufficient to provide the “exceedingly persuasive justification” needed to uphold discriminatory laws reviewed under equal protection.  Thus the marriage laws were unconstitutional.

In his fundamental right analysis, Judge Jones first concluded, like most other courts since the Windsor decision, that the Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling in Baker v. Nelson rejecting a challenge to Minnesota’s mixed-sex requirement for civil marriage was dispositive; the Court’s case law had evolved too much since then for that decision to answer the constitutional issues.  He rejected the claim that the constitutional right to marry (protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment) was only a right to marry a person of a different sex, but rather followed Loving v. Virginia and joined the many courts concluding that it was improper to build in the identities of the plaintiffs into the description of the right, which should be seen instead as the right to marry the person of one’s choice.  Pennsylvania’s law excluding same-sex couples from marriage infringed that rights and thus was unconstitutional for this reason as well, as was the state’s refusal to recognize marriages of same-sex couples validly entered in other jurisdictions.  And, like Judge McShane in the Geiger case, Judge Jones let his ruling go into effect already, so same-sex couples in Pennsylvania will be able to marry, as Oregon couples already are, as soon as a three-day waiting period between receiving a marriage license and being able to “solemnize” and thus legally enter a marriage.

With this pair of rulings, we have now seen nineteen court rulings in a row since the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Windsor last June holding in favor of marriage equality, and eight states have had their exclusionary marriage laws held unconstitutional in that time.  This unanimity of judicial opinion that the constitutional logic of equal protection, including in decisions like Windsor, establishes the unconstitutionality of bans on same-sex couples marrying bodes well for the chances of equality ultimately prevailing  when the Supreme Court next revisits the issue.

Sexual Orientation Discrimination Against Jurors Gets Heightened Scrutiny, Unconstitutional, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Holds

“We are all our own jury,/some day we’ll be put on trial.”

In a unanimous opinion authored by Judge Stephen Reinhardt, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that peremptory strikes of potential jurors on the basis of their sexual orientation is unconstitutional.  The court’s opinion in SmithKline Beecham Corp., dba GlaxoSmithKline v. Abbot Laboratories, decided January 21, 2014, may ultimately be even more significant for its holding that sexual orientation discrimination challenged under the Equal Protection Clause is subject to heightened scrutiny, not mere rationality review, a holding that goes beyond what the Ninth Circuit had said in Judge Reinhardt’s opinion in the Proposition 8 litigation (Perry v. Brown, holding California’s constitutional amendment stripping same-sex couples of the right to marry violated federal Equal Protection Clause because it could not survive even rational basis review).

The litigation began when SmithKline Beecham sued Abbot Labs over a dispute regarding a licensing agreement and the pricing of HIV meds (something Abbott dramatically raised following its agreement with SmithKline).  The case went to trial, and defendant Abbot used its first peremptory strike to remove a potential juror who indicated that he had a male partner.  The court’s opinion refers to him as “the only self-identified gay member of the venire,” but it cites no evidence other than the male juror candidate’s statements and pronouns referring to his partner, so he may well have been bisexual, a possibility the opinion fails to mention.  Either way, a strike of him because he was gay or bisexual would have been a strike based on his sexual orientation, so the court’s ultimate conclusion probably is unaffected by its assumption.

Although peremptory strikes differ from strikes “for cause” in that they do not require a striking attorney to identify bias on the part of the potential juror, they cannot be exercised for constitutionally impermissible reasons.  The Supreme Court held in Batson v. Kentucky (1986) that peremptory strikes based on race violate the Equal Protection Clause.  It subsequently extended that holding to cover peremptory strikes regardless of whether it’s a prosecutor or a defense attorney striking, and whether it’s a criminal or a civil case.  In J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel. T.B. (1994) the Supreme Court extended Batson to hold that equal protection also forbids jury strikes based on sex.  It has not yet considered the question whether the same is true of strikes based on sexual orientation.

A significant part of the answer to that question is whether sexual orientation discrimination is generally subject to heightened scrutiny or just rational basis review under the Equal Protection Clause.  (J.E.B. said that where discrimination against a group receives only rational basis review, jury strikes on that basis do not violate equal protection.)  But that too is a question the Supreme Court has not expressly answered.  In its highest profile ‘gay rights’ cases – Romer v. Evans (1996), which invalidated an anti-lesbigay amendment to Colorado’s state constitution under the federal Equal Protection Clause, Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down Texas’s same-sex only ban on oral and anal sex under the federal Due Process Clause , and United States v. Windsor (2013), which held that the section of the “Defense of Marriage Act” that ignored lawful marriages of same-sex couples violated equal protection – the Supreme Court has repeatedly failed to name and so definitively resolve the level of scrutiny that equal protection demands when government discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation.

Admitting this, the panel opinion had to decide whether sexual orientation discrimination is subject to heightened scrutiny.  Earlier Ninth Circuit precedent concerning the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had faced a similar question regarding Lawrence v. Texas.  In Witt v. Department of the Air Force, the Court of Appeals had to decide what kind of scrutiny applied to the military exclusion of lesbigay people under the Due Process Clause.  Lawrence did not say, so the Court of Appeals had to look to “what the Court actually did,” that is, what kind of analysis it conducted.  Doing likewise here to make sense of Windsor’s equal protection holding, the Ninth Circuit concluded that Windsor’s analysis was inconsistent with the great deference and mandatory consideration of hypothetical state purposes required under minimal rational basis review.  Accordingly, the Ninth Circuit panel determined that heightened scrutiny applies under the Equal Protection Clause to sexual orientation discrimination.  Judge Reinhardt’s opinion also held that earlier Ninth Circuit case law applying only rational basis review to sexual orientation discrimination challenged as violating equal protection was no longer good law because of the Supreme Court’s decision in Windsor.  (Minor quibble: the panel’s opinion says that the Supreme Court in Lawerence v. Texas recognized one Supreme Court decision, Department of Agriculture v. Moreno (1973), as applying “a more searching form of rational basis review,” when it was only Justice O’Connor’s opinion concurring in the judgment that espoused that position.)

Then, acknowledging that the histories of discrimination against racial minorities, against women, and against lesbigay vary (actually, the court again ignored bisexual persons to focus on “gays and lesbians”), and that gay and lesbian people were not openly excluded from juries the same way women (of any races) and African Americans (of any gender) were, the court recounted some of the pervasive discrimination lesbigay people have historically faced in the U.S. in governmental employment, immigration law, and military service, grounded in degrading stereotypes.  This helped establish that anti-lesbigay jury strikes stem from and cause the same kinds of injustices, for individuals, groups, and the entire polity, that warrant interpreting equal protection to forbid race- and sex-based strikes:

 “Strikes exercised on the basis of sexual orientation continue this deplorable tradition of treating gays and lesbians as undeserving of participation in our nation’s most cherished rites and rituals. They tell the individual who has been struck, the litigants, other members of the venire, and the public that our judicial system treats gays and lesbians differently. They deprive individuals of the opportunity to participate in perfecting democracy and guarding our ideals of justice on account of a characteristic that has nothing to do with their fitness to serve.”

The Court of Appeals also rejected Abbott’s exhortation not to extend Batson to sexual orientation-based strikes in order to protect individuals’ privacy rights.  The court thought those concerns significant, but was confident that the privacy of potential jurors can be protected through other means.  The court also rejected Abbot’s argument that it should not reach the Batson extension issue because none of SmithKline’s legal claims should have been allowed to reach the jury.  The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recognizes no harmless error exception to Batson violations, and even if there were, at least one of those claims required jury trial, the court held, but the jury was tainted by the discriminatory strike.  Accordingly, the court reversed the trial court and remanded the case for a new jury trial.

If the reasoning of the court of appeals is sustained, it could have big implications for anti-lesbigay discrimination, including laws excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage.  It is not clear whether the full Ninth Circuit would likely vote for review by an en banc panel of eleven judges or whether the Supreme Court would be likely to grant review, should Abbot seek either.  There is no real conflict between Court of Appeals holdings on this, with the Ninth Circuit breaking new ground here.  The Court does not choose to hear “gay rights” cases very frequently, and it just decided Windsor in June of 2013.  On the other hand, it only takes four Justices to vote to grant review, and some Justices could feel that it might be good to decide the general equal protection level-of-scrutiny issue in a factual context that probably divides the U.S. public less than does the issue of marriage for same-sex couples.  The Supreme Court ducked that general question in Windsor; only time will tell whether it chooses to take it up in the jury service context.