Lansing — The Michigan Supreme Court on Thursday ruled Michigan’s current laws against discrimination based on sex includes a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation, a ruling that effectively stops businesses from denying services, housing or employment opportunities to the gay community. The ruling also left intact a lower court ruling that found gender identity also was protected under the law’s protections for "sex." The 5-2 decision written by Republican-nominated Justice Elizabeth Clement found that discrimination based on sexual orientation involves bias based on sex because the individual’s sexual orientation is "generally determined by reference to their own sex." "In other words, the determination of sexual orientation involves both the sex of the individual and the sex of their preferred partner; referring to these considerations jointly as ‘sexual orientation’ does not remove sex from the calculation," Clement said. She was joined by the court’s four Democratic-nominated justices in the opinion that settled an issue long debated in Michigan’s judiciary and Legislature. The case arose in 2019, when the Michigan Department of Civil Rights began an investigation into two separate businesses that denied services to a gay couple and a person transitioning from a man to a woman. Sturgis-based […]
