WASHINGTON −The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear an appeal from a Christian college in Missouri that sued the Biden administration over its decision to shield transgender people from housing discrimination.
At issue was a 2021 memo from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that interpreted a federal anti-discrimination law as protecting transgender individuals. The College of the Ozarks claimed that the guidance conflicted with its ability to make housing assignments for students on the basis of sex assigned at birth.
“Because the college’s faith teaches that sex is based on male-female biology, not gender identity, the college assigns its dorms, roommates, and intimate spaces by sex and communicates that policy to students,” the college told the Supreme Court in its appeal earlier this year.
Lower courts, including the St. Louis-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, sided with the Biden administration on a procedural point last year, finding that the college did not have standing to sue in part because the government never attempted to enforce an anti-discrimination complaint against the school.
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The 2021 guidance, the Biden administration told the Supreme Court in its written response in late May, does not by itself require the school “or any other housing provider to do or refrain from doing anything.” The college, the administration said, “has not alleged any past, current, or threatened enforcement.”
The Biden administration’s memo was the result of a significant 2020 Supreme Court decision that bars discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County focused on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which explicitly prohibits workplace discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex and religion. A majority of the court held that sexual orientation and gender identity necessarily involve a person’s sex. Because of that, they reasoned, the law prohibits LGBTQ discrimination.
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The anti-discrimination housing provision of the Fair Housing Act use language that is similar to what’s in the workplace law, including an explicit prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex.
