Why Gorsuch upheld civil rights for LGBTQ Americans

In a landmark, and unexpected, decision yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that firing an employee because of their sexual orientation or gender identity violates federal law.

In what could be a month of blockbuster decisions from the high court, the ruling immediately ranks among the most consequential civil rights rulings in the court’s history, experts say. The fact it came from a court with a small but deeply conservative majority – and that so many people tried to access the opinion online it crashed the court’s website – only heightened the drama.

To hear Justice Neil Gorsuch – who wrote the 6-3 majority opinion – tell it, the landmark ruling was a straightforward one. The 172 pages of opinions tell a more complicated story – one of three-pronged debate between the court’s conservative justices over the best practices of textualism, a judicial method of interpreting