Oh no! We can't complicate the left's mission to turn America into Rhodesia!

Rights groups say the court made it easier to sue employers

Lawyers warn the ruling may also threaten diversity programs

The US Supreme Court's ruling that a St. Louis police sergeant can sue over a job transfer she claims was discriminatory was championed by human rights groups as "an enormous win for workers."

However, hours after the decision Wednesday, lawyers were warning that the outcome could have a chilling effect on employers' diversity initiatives because it adds to questions about what's legal.

Let me clarify this confusion for you: It's illegal to discriminate against someone based on their race. Even if the race being discriminated against is white (spit!).

And even if your justification is "equity."

This lawsuit was actually about sex discrimination against a woman. So, the standard sort of discrimination suit.

That's not what makes this dangerous for DEI programs. Minorities and women have been filing discrimination lawsuits for 60 years.

What makes this dangerous for DEI is that the Supreme Court set a somewhat-low threshold for what level of harm someone has to allege to have grounds for a discrimination suit.

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Workplace discrimination due to sex or other protected characteristics -- like race, color, religion or national origin -- is illegal, but courts across the country have disagreed about how substantial the unequal treatment must be to merit a legal claim. In this case, the city argued that Muldrow's lateral move at the same pay grade wasn't significantly harmful enough to meet the standard.

The Supreme Court disagreed, saying an employee just needed to show "some harm" under the terms of their employment, but it doesn't need to be "material," "substantial" or "serious." The decision makes it easier for workers to sue over discriminatory job transfers.

Some employment lawyers say the same reasoning could be carried over to workplace development programs or employee resource groups designed to benefit traditionally underrepresented cohorts: for example, a fellowship that only accepts Hispanic students or a leadership program only open to women.

Yes, because that's discrimination. These people are insisting that there's "good discrimination based on innate characteristics" and "bad discrimination based on innate characteristics."

There is no such distinction in the law. All discrimination based on innate characteristics is unlawful.

"Could you say that exclusion from participation in an mentoring or leadership program materially disadvantages someone?" said Jonathan Segal, a partner specializing in employment and labor law at Duane Morris. Even before the opinion, Segal was advising companies to eschew development programs that only allow people of protected groups to participate, he said. Now, he says, "the risk is even higher."

The Supreme Court's decision to overturn affirmative action in college admissions last year prompted executives across the country to reexamine their diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI programs. At the same time, conservative legal groups refocused their attentions on corporations, arguing that some initiatives meant to benefit marginalized groups amount to reverse discrimination.

Though the racial justice group Legal Defense Fund praised the ruling, Senior Economic Justice Counsel Pilar Whitaker acknowledged opponents of DEI programs likely "will see this as an opening" to launch new attacks on diversity programs.

They're all shocked to hear that discrimination may be bad when you're discriminating against white people.

The left should be celebrating a lawsuit extending employees' right to sue over discrimination based on skin color or sex. Instead, they're alarmed. Because this will limit their ability to discriminate against whites and men.

What the Court finds here can give rise to a suit is the situation where an employer continues paying an employee the same wage, but changes the other elements of his job so that the job is worse.

This is EXACTLY what Disney, for example, is alleged to have done to drive out it's "Pale and Male is Stale" animators, giving them the worst assignments despite them having the most experience, skill, and seniority, to make the job humiliating enough that they'd quit. Which many of them did.

And now the Supreme Court says this is actionable.