Supreme Court sides with straight Ohio woman who claimed workplace discrimination

A unanimous Supreme Court sided with an Ohio woman who claimed she was discriminated at work because she is straight.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had previously sided with her employer, the Ohio Department of Youth Services.

At issue in the case was a legal standard used by some federal circuit courts that impose a higher bar to prove discrimination on people who are heterosexual, white, and/or male than on minorities.

“Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the court’s three liberals, wrote in the unanimous opinion.

Brown wrote that the lower court’s higher standard was inconsistent with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars sex discrimination in the workplace.

The woman in the case, Marlean Ames, said that the Ohio Department of Youth Services, where she had worked for 20 years, passed her over for promotion — and then demoted her — because she is straight. In both instances, the jobs were given to LGBTQ+ people.

The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of those federal circuits that required non-minorities to show a higher standard for discrimination, ruled against her. The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with Ames, and struck down that higher standard.

Ames now gets another chance to make her case to the lower court with the lower standard to prove discrimination.