Most countries that have enabled same-sex marriage had a ban on workplace discrimination against gay people first. Yet in the US, even though the US Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that gay people can get married, it has yet to rule that they cannot be fired for their sexual orientation. [...]
The recent court rulings are the fruits of that argument. In April, a three-judge panel in the 7th Circuit decided, in Hively vs Ivy Tech Community College (pdf), that “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is a form of sex discrimination.” It relied in part on the Hopkins decision, ruling that heterosexuality was itself a sex stereotype—the notion that men should always partner with women and women with men. [...]
In 2013, a HuffPost/YouGov poll found that 52% of Americans (pdf) “favored a law prohibiting discrimination by employers against gays and lesbians.” Support for same-sex marriage, made legal in 2015, is at an all-time high this year, at 62%, according to the Pew Research Center. [...]
Experts say the reasons why those attempts have failed while the same-sex marriage campaign succeeded have to do with the universality of love and with political clout. Marriage equality had a lot of political momentum because there were “public campaigns around it” and “a lot of LGBT organizations got behind that cause”, says Christy Mallory, state and local policy director at the Williams Institute, a think tank part of UCLA that focuses on law and gender. “People sort-of understood the importance of marriage in their own lives and that really resonated with them.”
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