#ot19

Excerpts from the opinions:

"The individual respondents in Hobby Lobby opposed four methods of contraception covered by the mandate. They sincerely believed that human life begins at conception and that, because the challenged methods of contraception risked causing the death of a human embryo, providing those methods of contraception to employees would make the employers complicit in abortion."

"At the same time, we made it abundantly clear that, under RFRA, the Departments must accept the sincerely held complicity-based objections of religious entities. That is, they could not "tell the plaintiffs that their beliefs are flawed" because, in the Departments' view, "the connection between what the objecting parties must do...and the end that they find to be morally wrong...is simply too attenuated." "

"Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. 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."

"Those who adopted the Civil Rights Act might not have anticipated their work would lead to this particular result...But the limits of the drafters' imagination supply no reason to ignore the law's demands."

"Likewise, an employer who intentionally fires an individual homosexual or transgender employee in part because of that individual's sex violates the law even if the employer is willing to subject all male and female homosexual or transgender employees to the same rule."

"Next, the employers turn to Title VII's list of protected characteristics - race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Because homosexuality and transgender status can't be found on that list and because they are conceptually distinct from sex, the employer's reason, they are implicitly excluded from Title VII's reach. Put another way, if Congress had wanted to address these matters in Title VII, it would have referenced them specifically...But that much does not follow. We agree that homosexuality and transgender status are distinct concepts from sex. But, as we've seen, discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender status necessarily entails discrimination based on sex; the first cannot happen without the second."