The Supreme Court ruled in favor of an Ohio woman who claimed to be the victim of so-called reverse discrimination on Thursday, making it easier for people across the country who are members of majority groups to sue for discrimination.
The unanimous ruling puts an end to a standard used in 20 states and the District of Columbia that imposed a higher burden of proof on white, male, and straight individuals who claimed to be the victims of discrimination on the basis of those identities.
That standard was applied in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Michigan, as well as in other federal courts.
The ruling was a win for Marlean Ames, a 20-year veteran of the Ohio Department of Youth Services who said that she was denied a promotion and then demoted for being straight, while both the person who received the promotion and took her old job identified as LGBT.
Ames said that she didn’t know she’d be held to a different standard in her attempt to prove her discrimination claim, while her lawyer argued that the application of different standards on the basis of demographic characteristics was in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
“Little did I know at the time that I filed that my burden was going to be harsher than somebody else’s burden to prove my case,” Ames explained in a previous interview. “I want people to try and understand that we’re trying to make this a level playing field for everyone. Not just for a White woman in Ohio.”
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The case comes against the backdrop of the national fight over the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda, which corporations and educational institutions adopted en masse in 2020 and the following years.
Many of these DEI policies, The Daily Wire has documented, have resulted in discrimination targeting white, male, and Asian applicants.
IBM sponsored two paid internships, including one that discriminated against whites and Asians, and another that discriminated against men, unless those men identified as women.
NASCAR banned white applicants from its “diversity internship,” only removing the race-based selection criteria after a Daily Wire investigation. A music ensemble that has received federal funding discriminated against whites in its “BIPOC internship,” citing its commitment to “systemic allyship.”
Even the Biden administration’s Department of Defense created a discriminatory job pipeline that offered preferential treatment to women and non-white students seeking employment in the Pentagon. The program had to be amended in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action.
President Donald Trump has signed a slate of executive orders targeting the DEI agenda in education, the federal government, while the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sought to end the discriminatory policies in the private sector.