Bostock v. Clayton County

Read the rest of the series about the Bostock v. Clayton County court decision.

In June 2020, Bostock v. Clayton County made two momentous decisions; (1) it read “sexual orientation” into Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and (2) it did the same for “gender identity.” In this article, I shall focus on the latter.

The transgender component of Bostock involves a man named Mr. Stephens. He identifies as a woman and all references to him in the Bostock literature are to “Aimee Stephens” or “Ms. Stephens.” However, I will refer to him as Mr. Stephens throughout.

Mr. Stephens was terminated from employment at Harris Funeral Homes (“Harris Funeral”) after he declared he would begin presenting as a woman to perform his duties as a funeral director. Mr. Stephens filed an EEOC complaint which eventually wound its way to the Sixth Circuit. In its petition for review to the U.S. Supreme Court (“SCOTUS”), Harris Funeral’s counsel argued:

… the Sixth Circuit ordered it to allow a male funeral director to dress and present as a woman at work. Harris Homes must do that even though its owner reasonably determined that the employee’s actions would violate the company’s sex-specific dress code and disrupt the healing process of grieving families. The language of Title VII does not mandate that result.

(Petition, 2)

The most important thing to know about Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) is that it demonstrates the pillars of Western society no longer have anything anchoring them to reality. When your way of interpreting the world isn’t tied to a real, concrete revelation that explains reality, then you slowly drift away from the shore into madness.

Think of revelation as the eyeglasses that allow you to see the world and understand it. Now, think of the shoreline as reality. Then, think of that line holding your boat fast to the dock as the lifeline that connects you to reality.

In the West, we have cut the line and smashed the eyeglasses. We’re drifting away from the shore. At first, our boat bobbed aimlessly pretty close to the dock. That went on for several decades. But, we’ve now edged ever further away and the current has us. The dock is gone. The shoreline is gone.

We’re in the open sea. We’re done.

That’s what Bostock shows us. This Court decision is that last speck of land fading from sight as the horizon flattens into nothingness. It’s when we realize that this is really happening. We really are alone.

I just read Revelation 12-18 this afternoon, and the identity of the woman in Revelation 17-18 suddenly makes so much more sense in light of the West’s complete moral collapse. Bostock v. Clayton County is the final domino in a chain that has made me now fully realize the scope of the task for faithful pastors in the 21st century.

To read people argue, in confident legal prose, that discrimination “because of … sex” and discrimination “because of … sexual orientation” are analgous is astonishing, in a deceptive way. You get so caught up in parsing the intent of the actors and considering the legal arguments that you forget just how morally bankrupt this discussion even is. There is no longer even a pretense of a foundation to anchor morality and ethics in the public square. As I wrote in my discussion of the Obergefell decision, once a culture dynamites its objective foundation for values all that’s left to anchor us to morality is inertia. 

Well, the inertia has indeed toppled the crumbling edifice with Bostock. The decision isn’t so awful, in and of itself. It’s awful because it signals that sanity has fallen. Once and for all, it has gone.

I knew this before, but I didn’t know it before.