The Supreme Court unanimously revived a straight woman’s “reverse discrimination” case against her former employer Thursday, lowering the legal hurdle for white and straight employees to bring such lawsuits.
The 9-0 decision rejects that members of a majority group must show “background circumstances” in addition to the normal requirements to prove a claim under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.
“We conclude that Title VII does not impose such a heightened standard on majority-group plaintiffs,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, former President Biden’s sole appointee to the court, wrote for the court.
Marlean Ames, who worked for the Ohio Department of Youth Services for two decades, sued under the landmark law over claims she was passed over for a promotion and demoted in favor of gay colleagues.
Ames appealed to the Supreme Court after lower judges ruled in favor of Ohio, finding Ames hadn’t shown proven “background circumstances” that indicate hers is the unusual case where an employer is discriminating against the majority.
“By establishing the same protections for every ‘individual’—without regard to that individual’s membership in a minority or majority group—Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs alone,” Jackson wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, two of the court’s six Republican-appointed justices, wrote separately to call for examining the court’s broader framework it established in a 1973 decision to evaluate employment discrimination claims, warning the framework may not be a “workable and useful evidentiary tool.”
“Judge-made doctrines have a tendency to distort the underlying statutory text, impose unnecessary burdens on litigants, and cause confusion for courts. The ‘background circumstances’ rule—correctly rejected by the Court today—is one example of this phenomenon,” Thomas wrote.
Xiao Wang, the director of the University of Virginia’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic who argued before the justices on Ames’s behalf, said he was “pleased” with the high court’s decision.
“I think that this has been a long process and ultimately a journey,” Wang said in a brief interview. “We’re really happy the Supreme Court ruled in our favor.”
The Hill has reached out to the Ohio attorney general’s office for comment.
Ohio’s Department of Youth Services hired Ames in 2004 and a decade later promoted her to become administrator of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA).
In 2019, she interviewed for another job at the department but was not hired. Her gay supervisor suggested she retire, and days later, Ames was demoted with a significant pay cut. A 25-year-old gay man was then promoted to become PREA administrator. And months later, the department chose a gay woman for the role Ames unsuccessfully applied for.
A three-judge 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel agreed Ames would’ve prevailed if she was a gay woman. But they ruled against her since she didn’t meet the additional requirement as part of a minority group.
Ames’s appeal at the Supreme Court was supported by the Justice Department, the American First Legal Foundation and the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation, among others. The NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund and the National Association of Counties were among those that filed briefs backing Ohio.
Updated at 10:57 a.m. EDT
