Landmark Funeral Home

G.B.T. rights.The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has said the 1964 act does guarantee the protections. But the Trump administration has taken the opposite position, saying that the landmark legislation that outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and, notably, sex, cannot fairly be read to apply to discrimination based on sexual orientation or transgender status.The three cases the court accepted are the first concerning L.G.B.T. rights since the retirement last summer of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, a champion of gay rights. His replacement by the more conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh could shift the court’s approach to cases concerning gay men, lesbians and transgender people.Most federal appeals courts have interpreted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to exclude sexual orientation discrimination. But two of them, in New York and Chicago, recently issued decisions ruling that discrimination against gay men and lesbians is a form of sex discrimination.The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case from New York, Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda, No. 17-1623, along with one from Georgia that came to the opposite conclusion, Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., No. 17-1618.The New York case was brought by a skydiving instructor, Donald Zarda, who said he was fired because he was gay. His dismissal followed a complaint from a female customer who had voiced concerns about being tightly strapped to Mr. Zarda during a tandem dive. Mr. Zarda, hoping to reassure the customer, told her that he was “100 percent gay.”Mr. Zarda sued under Title VII and lost the initial rounds. He died in a 2014 skydiving accident, and his estate pursued his case.Last year, a divided 13-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit allowed the lawsuit to proceed. Writing for the majority, Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann concluded that “sexual orientation discrimination is motivated, at least in part, by sex and is thus a subset of sex discrimination.”In dissent, Judge Gerard E. Lynch wrote that the ...