Gorsuch’s textualism promoted justice for LGBTQ people—this time
Why we can’t rely on this or any other hermeneutical principle
Multiple recent Supreme Court rulings are worthy of celebration. One is Bostock v. Clayton County, which protects LGBTQ people from employment discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It prevents Gerald Bostock and countless others from being fired for their sexual orientation or gender identity without recourse. It’s a tangible step toward the goal of securing fundamental rights equally for all—an ideal to which the judicial system aspires and a necessary condition for justice.
Many observers were surprised that Neil Gorsuch authored the Bostock opinion. The conservative justice’s vote in favor of LGBTQ rights in this case was rooted in a theory of legal interpretation called textualism. Textualism locates authority in the plain meaning of a text’s words, rather than making claims about authorial intent or importing personal views.
Gorsuch’s hermeneutic is similar to the one Martin Luther and other reformers used in biblical exegesis. After being trained in the medieval church’s methods for reading scripture through Christian ideas about God, salvation, and eschatology, Luther insisted on recovering the plain meaning of the text. Freed from multiple layers of allegorical meaning, readers could identify more closely with the biblical characters and their struggles.
