In a landmark decision, Michigan’s Supreme Court has ruled that a state law against sex discrimination also protects individuals from discrimination based on their sexual orientation.
Rouch World, an outdoor event space roughly 10 miles north of Michigan’s border with Indiana, had refused to allow a lesbian couple to hold their wedding onsite. Uprooted Electrolysis, which provides permanent hair removal services, would not serve a transgender woman.
In a lawsuit against the state following customer complaints and an investigation by Michigan’s Department of Civil Rights, both businesses argued that they were entitled to deny services to LGBTQ+ people because of their “sincerely held religious beliefs.”Only the instance of alleged discrimination based on sexual orientation made its way to the state Supreme Court.in the Michigan Supreme Court arguing that the language of the ELCRA prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation..
“This court’s duty is to say what the law is, not what it thinks the law ought to be,” Zahra wrote. “But this is exactly what a majority of this court has done here.” Zahra argued that when the ELCRA was passed in 1976, the public’s understanding of the word “sex” was much more narrow than it is today. The law as written does not prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, according to Zahra, because the ELCRA was not passed to protect sexual behavior.
“Context and intent matter when interpreting statutes,” Zahra wrote. “When read in context it becomes eminently clear that the plain and ordinary meaning of the word ‘sex’ in 1976 did not include sexual orientation.”
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