Updated June 5, 2025 at 6:17 PM PDT
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued important decisions on guns, employment discrimination against straight people, and a tax exemption that was denied to a Catholic charity.
All of the decisions were unanimous, and in each case, the majority opinion was written by one of the court's liberals, proving that liberals can also rule for religion, for gun manufacturers, and for a woman claiming she was discriminated against on the job for being straight.
Sex discrimination
The sex discrimination case involved an Ohio woman who claims that first she didn't get a promotion and then was subsequently demoted because she is straight. The promotion she was seeking went to a lesbian and when she was demoted her job went to a gay man.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals tossed her case out at an early stage because she did not meet the higher legal bar that the appeals court required in discrimination cases for members of a majority group.
But on Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected that higher bar.
Writing for the majority, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed to the text of the federal employment discrimination law, which draws no distinction between majority-group plaintiffs and minority-group plaintiffs. By establishing the same protections for every individual, she said, Congress "left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority-group plaintiffs."
The decision is likely to have widespread effects. In all, five federal appeals courts -–covering 20 states and the District of Columbia -- have the same high bar that was struck down on Thursday for majority plaintiffs, including white and straight employees.
Mexican suit against U.S. gun manufacturers
The gun case was brought by Mexico against seven American gun manufacturers for allegedly aiding and abetting an illegal influx of firearms from the U.S. into Mexico.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the Court's decision, deftly explaining the difference between the problem and the law. Mexico, as she pointed out, has a severe gun problem, which its government views as "coming from north of the border." The country has only a single gun store and issues fewer than 50 gun permits a year.
But gun traffickers can purchase firearms in the U.S. — often illegally and in bulk — and deliver them to drug cartels in Mexico, where they are used to kill, kidnap, and commit drug crimes. Indeed, according to the Mexican government, as many as 90 percent of the guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico originated in the United States.
The Mexican government's lawsuit, which sought billions of dollars in damages, alleged that U.S. gun manufacturers failed to exercise reasonable care to prevent this gun trafficking, which they knew was going on.
But the court didn't buy that argument. As Kagan said in court on Thursday, the Mexican government might have had a good theory, but U.S cities brought similar suits in the early 2000s, and Congress promptly passed a law shielding gun manufacturers from lawsuits stemming from the criminal use of a firearm by a third party.
The law does have an exception for cases in which a manufacturer or seller knowingly aids and abets criminal sales. Mexico says that is what U.S. manufacturers do — they know who the bad apple dealers are and still do business with them to boost profits.
But Kagan, writing for the court, said Mexico's complaint "does not plausibly allege the kind of conscious … and culpable participation in another's wrongdoing needed to prove liability. We have little doubt that some of these sales take place," she said, but the Mexican government "has not sufficiently alleged that the gun makers not only participate in illegal gun sales but also want them to happen," which, she said, is what the law requires.
Reacting to the court's decision, Jonathan Lowy, president of the Global Action on Gun Violence, called the decision a "get-out- of-court-free card" that "protect[s] the crime gun profits of the worst of the worst in the gun industry when they supply crooked gun dealers."
Religious tax exemptions
And finally, in a case involving Catholic Charities, the court ruled that the state of Wisconsin violated the Constitution by refusing to give a Catholic social ministry group the same exemption as it gives to churches, so that they don't have to pay the state's unemployment tax. The state had maintained that the social ministry group didn't qualify for the exemption because it is not a proselytizing entity.
Writing for the court today, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said: "It is fundamental to our constitutional order that the government maintain 'neutrality between religion and religion."
"There may be hard calls to make in policing that rule," she acknowledged, "but this is not one of them."
Reacting to the decision, Eric Rassbach, who represented the Catholic Charities Bureau, said, "Wisconsin shouldn't have picked this fight in the first place. It was always absurd to claim that Catholic Charities wasn't religious because it helps everyone, no matter their religion."
The Catholic Charities victory caps a remarkable run of victories for religious entities at the Supreme Court, nearly 20 wins going back to Donald Trump's first term.
At the same time, however, Thursday's decision could open the door to large numbers of religious groups, some of them employing tens of thousands of people, fleeing and weakening the unemployment compensation system, which at one time was mandatory in Wisconsin and other states.
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