2013—Less than three weeks before oral argument in cases challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s marriage laws, Justice Anthony Kennedy uses the dedication ceremony of a new court library (the “Anthony M. Kennedy Library and Learning Center”) to distribute a reading list that he has developed for young people.
Entitled “Understanding Freedom’s Heritage: How to Keep and Defend Liberty,” Kennedy’s list runs through many great selections—Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the Magna Carta, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”—only to culminate in Kennedy’s own opinion in Lawrence v. Texas (holding that there is a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy).
2018—In EEOC v. Harris Funeral Homes, a Sixth Circuit panel, in an opinion written by Judge Karen Nelson Moore, rules that Title VII’s ban on discrimination on the basis of “sex” prohibits discrimination on the basis of “transgender or transitioning status”—and that a funeral home therefore had a legal obligation to allow a male employee who “intended to transition from male to female” to dress as a woman while working at funeral services. (The ruling is currently under review in the Supreme Court.)