Justice Gorsuch Takes Heat From Social Conservatives on LGBTQ Job Rights | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: This post appears here courtesy of the LifeZette, and written by Polizette Staff.

    Social conservatives in the GOP are not happy with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and his vote this week to protect LGBTQ job rights. Chief Justice John Roberts joined him in that majority decision. All sides were surprised by the vote, both Right and Left.

    The vote angered Carrie Severino, who as president of the Judicial Crisis Network spent much to help confirm Gorsuch. She said earlier in the week Gorsuch acted "for the sake of appealing to college campuses and editorial boards. This was not judging, this was legislating-a brute force attack on our constitutional system. This was the hijacking of textualism. You can't redefine the meaning of words themselves and still be doing textualism."

    Mark Levin, the popular radio host, said "Roberts no longer pretends to be a judge; now Gorsuch has left his robe behind as well."

    However, libertarian conservatives in the GOP were pleased with the decision and mocked Democrats and the Left who predicted Gorsuch would be a reactionary jurist.

    At his 2017 Senate confirmation hearing Gorsuch sounded like an evenhanded judge. Many on the Left thought he was soft pedaling his ideology and would shift hard right when on the court: "I'm not in a position to tell you whether I'd personally like or dislike any precedent. That's not relevant to my job." Gorsuch also said then the gay marriage decision of 2015 was "absolutely settled law... We must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear. An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids." He said this before he sat on the court. Socially conservative GOP senators voted for him en masse, even after the above testimony.

    Justice Brett Kavanaugh disagreed with Gorsuch's position on the issue: "Our role is not to make or amend the law." Kavanaugh said that the civil rights law "does not prohibit employment discrimination because of sexual orientation," and the majority opinion "rewrites history." The social Right spent their ammo well with that fight.

    But surveys show slight majorities of GOP voters -especially young, male, and suburban Republicans- tend to be socially moderate. President Trump understands this and was restrained in his comments on Gorsuch and the justice's position on the LGBT job protection question: "They've ruled. I read the decision, and some people were surprised. But they've ruled and we live with their decision. That's what it's all about. We live with the decision of the Supreme Court. Very powerful, very powerful decision, actually."

    This is not a great surprise, given the president's longtime former status as a Manhattan Democrat. When running for president in 2015, in interviews Trump refused to criticize the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. He even held aloft an LGBTQ flag at a campaign event. So this issue will likely quietly slip away. However, it will also certainly exacerbate the divide between social and libertarian Republicans.