Gorsuch, after taking the oath of office, pledged to the family of the man he was replacing on the nation’s highest court—Justice Antonin Scalia, who unexpectedly died in 2016—that “I won’t ever forget that the seat I inherit today is that of a very, very great man.”
Scalia was the towering champion of the jurisprudence of “original intent,” or “textualism,” in which judges strictly adhere to the original language and intent of a law, rather than indulging in legislating their own intent from the judicial bench.
“The Court’s opinion is like a pirate ship. It sails under a textualist flag, but what it actually represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Justice Scalia excoriated—the theory that courts should ‘update’ old statutes so that they better reflect the current values of society.”
As a result, Bostock is prompting howls of protest and anguish among original-intent adherents and religious conservatives who supported Gorsuch and other like-minded judicial nominees with the expectation that they would protect freedom of worship and practice in American daily life.
“I was shocked at the fundamental legal and historical errors that Gorsuch made in this opinion and how totally wrong he is. His claim that the common public understanding of the word ‘sex’ in the 1964 Civil Rights Act included homosexuality and transgenderism is absurd,” constitutional lawyer Hans von Spakovsky told The Epoch Times.
“That provision referred to the biological differences between a male and female and was intended to stop the rampant employment discrimination suffered by women at that time. This has to be one of the most poorly reasoned and disingenuous opinions written by a justice in decades,” von Spakovsky said.
Hawley, the youngest member of the Senate, said, “If textualism and originalism gives you this decision, if you can invoke them in order to reach a decision, an outcome, that fundamentally changes the scope and meaning and application of statutory law, then textualism and originalism don’t mean much at all.”
“I think to myself, this is the problem of the deep state, or the bureaucratic state, that they take it upon themselves to take the interpretation of these things from Congress to establish and usurp constitutionally given rights such as religious freedom,” Daly said.
Daly said he has heard “over and over again from my Christian conservative friends that we like 80 percent of what President Trump does and 20 percent of what he says. ... His agreement was ‘I will get good judges on the court.’ Well, at least with Gorsuch, it was a miss, from our perspective.”
Sharp said Gorsuch acknowledged the law has protections for religious groups to hire co-religionists, but “people of faith are saying it’s not that we have any hostility against LGBT but rather that we have a duty to be faithful to our religious teachings and for our employees to do so. I think that is going to be a flashpoint after this decision.”
“The decision did not interpret a provision of the Constitution, such as the Equal Protection Clause,” Morris told The Epoch Times. “Rather, it interpreted and applied a provision of a statute, which is subject to change or repeal by Congress. If it has the political will, Congress can readily correct the effects of any judicial interpretation of a statute by changing the statute.”