Your Civil Rights? A slippery slop…
By Don Valentine and Nicole Nutting
Pay close attention to how quickly in the next years your Civil Rights can be eclipsed. On July 27 C.N.N. politics reported that the Trump administration advised the D.O.J. to intervene in a Title VII case. ”(CNN)The Justice Department filed an amicus brief asserting Wednesday saying that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not cover employment “discrimination based on sexual orientation.”
Title VII protects against employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sexual orientation. The case law in this area has nearly four decades of precedent. Note, none of the parties requested the D.O.J. to produce the amicus brief. The position the Trump D.O.J. attorney, Mr. Mooppan, argued was that “out of workplace sexual conduct” was fair game for employers under the Civil Rights statute. This will be taken up by the Supreme Court in time due to conflicting opinions by the lower Federal courts.
We need to be wary if that logic goes down that “Slippery Slope”.
Suppose a soon to be Junior Senator from Alabama, Judge Roy Moore, rises to power. Trump does not run for a second term. Then Steve Bannon’s crew has another more suitable stooge [er, surrogate] for the boisterous neo right wing. Not that outlandish. We just had a Black President. Now a reality T.V. star is our sitting President.
In that scenario, what could happen to our Civil Rights. L.G.B.T. people can’t work. Black people become reduced back to 3/5ths of a human. Women lose the right to vote. Abortion rights vanish. We can quickly can wind up at the bottom of that slope!
